Of course this is a daft thing to say. You don’t want to be failing at artwork. I only ask because I have, on occasion, witnessed designers asking that they be ‘allowed to fail’. I’m guessing that this is to do with perhaps not quite hitting the mark with a particular concept that they are working on, but nevertheless getting something out of it. There will be times when this either has no consequence; perhaps in the early stages of a pitch, or even in their own downtime. From the outside looking in, this seems like a worthwhile exercise. Lessons will be learned, successful ideas will be banked for later. Ideas that don’t will be remembered as such, and if there are ever times when some of these ideas and work make it through to a client, they will be rejected, and other than perhaps some mild embarrassment, hopefully quickly forgotten about and replaced with better ones. Yes, I know this is all a bit reductive but this is a blog post, not an academic essay.
So how do we go about doing the equivalent?
Artwork is a more binary, risk-averse process. There are a handful of times across my ‘career’ (I prefer the term ‘working life’) where I have been privileged enough to be in a position to make some costly mistakes. Broadly, I’ve found that artwork mistakes fall into two categories. The first, most obvious one, is where you’ve missed something and it’s a clear-cut mistake. I believe, as an artworker, it is best to own those mistakes, but I have found that, mostly through fear (we are there to be shot at, are we not?), we are reluctant to do that. Also, as a freelancer, that ain’t going down too well and you won’t be back there again.
The second category is the mistake made as a result of either not enough, or incorrect, information. The amount of times I’ve asked for production specs for a press ad and have been told ‘210×297’. If I had a pound for every time etc etc. Also, asking for a ‘CMYK PDF’ is a bit like asking a designer for ‘a press ad for Heinz’; but not actually providing any more information other than that . You’ll get one, but there will be quite a few boxes that it won’t tick. It can be mentally exhausting responding to ‘any questions, let me know’, when you’re missing so much information in the first place. Then when you do ask questions, you’ll be remembered for ‘asking too many questions’, something I overheard a designer saying only this week about another artworker; one of the most accomplished artworkers I’ve ever worked with. If you don’t have the information (and you’re not going to get it), you will naturally try and cover as many bases as you can, sometimes to the detriment of you and the job. Outlining fonts, generic CMYK settings, plonking loads of instructions in the slug and hoping someone sees them. Then it’s ‘send me the files and i’ll send them on to the printer’, as if you can’t even be trusted to do that.
OK, just going to step down from the soap box now to try and be more constructive, for my sake more than yours.
The answer of course is you can’t fail, but sometimes you will, and once again, I maintain that you must own your mistakes. I once worked at an awful agency that ground me down so much that I would end up putting off any actual artwork until the end of the day, once most people had gone home. I made a fundamental mistake that the printer (appointed by the client, the printers themselves held us, the agency, in utter contempt) almost wilfully ignored. Perhaps, subconsciously I wanted to make a mistake and finally be put out of my misery, who knows? Anyway, I immediately held my hands up as it was a fair cop. A comradely gesture from the account exec was to also take the blame even though he had done nothing wrong, but a more experienced client services type certainly wouldn’t have done that. In the end we claimed on the insurance and the reprint pretty much took place the following day so no time was lost either. Tragically, my punishment was to not be fired, which probably would have been a blessing, in retrospect.
Once you take ownership, you need to be able to show how to learn from your mistakes. In this case, mine was to allow the artwork part of my job (kind of the most important part of being an artworker, I feel) to become so marginalised because everyone else in the agency felt that way about it. You almost need to ‘sell in’ the idea of artwork at some agencies, even if they are perfectly aware of what it is you are there for. You also need to swallow the reality that many people don’t see what that role brings, but that’s their problem. These agencies aren’t charities. If you weren’t needed, you wouldn’t be there.
It’s important to be able to articulate what you are doing at every stage. I found, at this particular agency, that perhaps 2 or 3 client services people out of 10 were prepared to listen to what I had to say without glazing over, but that was enough to get me by when things went wrong. If you’re able to at least give the impression of competence most of the time, when errors happen, you’ll be given the benefit of the doubt.
Going back to the ‘how to fail’ thing, rather than ‘what to do when you fail’. I guess the artworker equivalent to how designers want to fail is when you’re faffing around with photoshop actions and illustrator scripts, trying to create effects and whatnot. If I’d just said that at the beginning of this post I could’ve saved myself 900 words.
you are not special 