Want to succeed?

If you want to succeed, make your goals measurable. And after your project is done, actually evaluate the results. Define success in a concrete way. Maybe you want to increase sales by 30% or have your work juried into a national show; whatever, just be sure it's something you can easily verify when you need to. Should you fail to achieve your goal, adjust what you are doing—don't change the goal unless it was unrealistic to begin with. This is the best way to get to where you want to go.

Who defines success?

I often ask students to tell me who determines success. They invariably respond that it's the client. To some degree that's true, but a better answer is that your target audience does. That is, the people who see your work in an ad or use a website you designed or see your work on their living room wall do. You might think something is your best work ever. Your client may love it. It might even when awards, but if the people it was intended for don't respond in the way you hoped, nothing else really matters.

Focus on what's important

Too many people work too hard on things that just don't matter. Plan for success. Define the problem you need to solve, then break the solution down into small discrete steps that are easy to do and simple to verify that they have been done correctly (especially important when programing). Now you know where to spend your time and effort.

Be sure you understand the problem before you start working on the solution. I often see students working really hard on a project, creating something wonderful, only to find it's not the right solution to the assignment. Excellent work from a technical and aesthetic standpoint, but a failure nonetheless.

Things to avoid

As a teacher I have made my share of mistakes over the last 10 years. Here are some things that are sure to hinder student progress:

Overemphasizing the tool

It seems to me that in most digital art classes there is too much emphasis on the tool. Learning how to use software is the principal goal of the class to the detriment of everything else. Craft is important, particularly in today's environment, but it is no more important than concept and aesthetics. Work lacking in any one of these three things is superficial and pointless. We need to have something meaningful to say and the technical skills needed to communicate it in a compelling way.

Undue influence

It's vital for artists to study artwork they admire. It's also a time-honored tradition to copy these works in the hopes of developing the same degree of skill apparent in the work, but we need to go beyond that. There is a fine line between plagiarism and inspiration that students have trouble understanding.

As a learning exercise copying is okay and valuable. When creating an original piece of art, it's worthless. When we study other people's work we need to see beyond the superficial. I always tell my students that a good artist steals, a bad artist borrows. By that I mean we want to understand someone else's work well enough to make it our own. We want to evoke the same responses in our viewers as he did in his.

To do this we must first determine exactly what appeals to us in the artwork and then figure out how he designed his picture to express this. With that understanding we can create artwork that is a conceptual copy, not a stylistic one. In essence, we steal what makes the artwork great and incorporate it into our own work.

here is a modern obsession with style. Students are told to make themselves memorable by perfecting a unique style or to make themselves more marketable by working in whatever style is the current trend. When I was in art school we were told not to worry about style. That it is something that develops through experience and artistic growth and couldn't be suppressed even if we wanted to. I believe this is correct—students will benefit far more from being taught basic concepts and everyday techniques. Over time their style will emerge naturally and it will be as unique as they are.

Beginners need direction

I have known college professors who give freshmen a problem and expect them to solve it without any real guidance. A very effective approach for seniors, which I endorse, but a baffling one for first-year students. Without a clear understanding of what can be done and how to do it, students are hopelessly lost. We need to expose them to what's possible, then give them the knowledge and skills required to solve the problems we pose. After that, we can assign projects that force them to demonstrate that they understand and can apply the concepts we have taught.

Some people believe that structured workflows are a bad thing. I disagree. Creativity doesn't have to be chaotic. Experimentation is important, I do it all the time, but it needs to be controlled otherwise you waste a lot of time and effort.

I enjoy creating art with computers as well as traditional materials and often combined them in my work. I always try to use the best tool to express what I have to say. This blend of approaches generally results in an image with a distinct visual quality that would be hard or impossible to create in any other way.

Teach students a workflow similar to the one you use professionally. Simplify it by removing anything that is trivial or too time-consuming to be practical. Whenever possible I like to run the class as if I was the art director and the students, my employees. This has several benefits:

• Students get a sense of what it's like to work in the real world.
• Following sound procedures becomes a habit.
• They are forced to deal with changes—something that happens all the time in the workplace, but rarely in school.
• I can help them progress faster because I can detect and prioritize problems as early as possible. Students can focus on correcting the most important things while there is still time to fix them. This approach keeps them motivated. It's demoralizing when the only feedback they get is at the end of the project, and it's negative. Good students want to do good work and are frustrated by the fact that it's too late for corrections.

Planning is another area teachers should stress. Most students significantly underestimate its importance. On a typical project I spend at least two thirds of my time planning it out. Sometimes even more, particularly if I am unfamiliar with some piece of technology or if it is been a while since I have done anything similar. I encourage students to think about and practice the techniques they are going to use on a project while they are planning the project. This lets them evaluate the viability of their approach and gives them a better understanding of how long it will take to do.

When I started teaching I was shocked to find that most students were clueless when it came to estimating time. To remedy this, I made them report the time they spent on each step of the project. Unfortunately this backfired. Half the students misreported their time. Some told me they spent less time than they really did in the hope that I would be impressed by how skillful and efficient they were. The others padded their time so that I would think they put an extraordinary amount of effort into their projects. Now I ask them to accurately track their time without turning it into me. Those who do become better planners.

For web and application development projects I insist students prototype their designs at the beginning of the project. I want them to demonstrate proof-of-concept by building a product that is fully functional, but visually simple—greeked text for copy and colored rectangles instead of images. Separating technology from aesthetics makes the project more manageable and forces a more balanced workload over the life of the project.