Quality Control for Beginners

Advice for beginning designers

As a beginning designer the most important thing you can do to improve your skills is to simply MAKE MORE THINGS. Whether or not one item checks out perfectly is not really going to make much difference in the long run. The more items you make on a consistent basis, the more you will see your skills grow.

For this reason, if you are a beginning designer remember that any quality control reports you receive are useful to consider when making future designs, but ARE NOT something you need to stress about, or use a judgement towards your designs. All the designers make mistakes, especially beginners.

Leaving QC feedback for beginning designers

If you are leaving feedback for a beginning designer, please keep in mind that your main goal is to encourage their development as a designer. So please remember that at the beginning it is not helpful to hold them to a standard you would except from an expert designer. At this point the best help you can offer is to leave encouraging comments and to point out obvious errors such as:

  • Lots of stray pixels
  • Very jagged edges

A lot of quality control issues come down to opinion, and especially during a designer's early days it's most helpful not to overwhelm them with excessive reports.

Of course this doesn't mean that you should never leave QC reports for beginning designers: some QC reports are helpful and relevant for beginners. It just means holding these designers to a different standard than you would hold expert designers.

Encouraging beginning designers

If you do leave QC feedback for a beginning designer, please consider also leaving them a nice encouraging comment on one of their designs for each QC problem that you report.

This is a nice habit to have in general for any time you leave a QC report, but is especially encouraging for beginning designers.