About six weeks into my second year of design school, I realized I wasn’t working as hard as my peers. Sure, I was getting everything done and getting good grades, but I was done with my assignments every day around seven while my classmates worked late into the night. I was perplexed each time I heard people complain about their endless work. Am I just managing my workload better? Are they just doing more outside of school, like extracurricular activities or a job? But when I compared my work with theirs, I realized that theirs was often more thought out and polished than mine. They were simply putting more into each assignment than I was.

Clearly I had to step it up, but I didn’t really know how. I take my work as far as I feel it can go, then stop, turn it in, and get feedback from my professor. How could I develop it further independently, before getting feedback?

So I developed a set of questions to ask myself when I felt my work was done to help push it to the next level. Hopefully, they can help you too.

Composition

  • Is the main element in the center of the format? Can it be moved and still convey the message?

  • What if the main element were dramatically scaled up or down?

  • Is the negative space around the element activated? Are there interesting shapes of negative space?

  • Where does the viewer’s eye go first? Is that where you want it to go?

  • Is there an overall system governing the organization of the piece?

Contrast

  • What if there were a contrast in scale?

  • What if there were a contrast in value or color?

  • What if there were a contrast in form?

  • Do the lines in the composition vary in width and size?

Polish

  • Are the areas where elements intersect or overlap clean and the right size?

  • Are the colors the best they can be, both in appropriateness to the subject and in terms of aesthetics?

Texture

  • Can the texture of the elements be improved by overlapping elements of differing scale?

  • Can one element be reversed out of another?