False Praises: A Lesson Learnt for a Novice Graphic Designer
If you are thinking about finally starting out as a graphic designer and making your presence felt on the internet, then this article is relevant to you because I was in the same position as you.
When I decided to stop procrastinating and took the plunge to start publishing my work online, I paid attention to the comments people would leave as I was self-taught and feedbacks , regardless of whether it was proper or malformed, was still a scarcity for me. It is good to expand your circle of critics for your work to a larger audience but it is even better to just find an expert whom you could contact directly for those feedback. At least for me, I was just happy to get feedbacks.
It was a few months down the road after publishing my first Grumpy Codes episode that I realize I needed to sieve through certain comments made on my work.
I would like to call these comments "false praises" as they always follow this recurring pattern of approach. Such messages often consist of one-line compliment. However, they tend to have strings attached to them. Even though it is heartening as a novice designer to get a compliment for your work online, be wary of who is actually making it.
In Instagram, clicking on the name of the "person" commenting would reveal them to be some organization that is relevant to your work. Such organizations often use premium automated tools provided by the platform to help like other user's works and simply does not show whether they actually like your work or not. Even if these commenters are just individuals themselves, taking a second look will reveal their porfolio that are also relevant to your work. This insiduous approach is just a normal marketing strategy to garner more attention to their own site. By liking your work, you are highly likely to visit their site.
In other words, rather than actually earnestly liking your work, these pragmatic users are only using you to forward their own agendas.
Like in the screenshot above, some false praises can be just as blatant in their agenda and it is simply disgusting.
I have encountered similar examples on my Tapastic platform which has served as my main platform for Grumpy Codes.
This lesson strongly enforces what many veterans in social media have been preaching all this time:
The number of likes you get does not reflect how good your work is.
You are only using social media to make your presence felt, not collect constructive feedbacks.
That being said, if you want earnest feedbacks and lots of it, it is best to find your own local group of artists whom you can trust to provide such critics or better yet, find an instructor.
