Criteria for good work

What constitutes good work?

There are three questions to ask yourself at the end of every job. Is the client happy? Is the job profitable? Is the project newsworthy?

1 Is the client happy? Pretty crucial when you think about it. If the client isn’t happy you’ve got problems. You may have executed a great piece of work, it might even occupy the prime spot in your portfolio, but if your client isn’t happy with it you might be in trouble. At worst, it might mean that you don’t get paid: if it’s a big job, with a large fee involved, perhaps substantial outside costs, this can be catastrophic. It might also mean that you don’t get any more work from that client. It will almost certainly mean that you won’t get any recommendations or referrals from that client. And perhaps most painful of all, you will know that you have failed as a graphic designer. By the nature of design we are obliged to make our clients happy. To fail to do this is to fail as a graphic designer.

2 Is the job profitable? By profitable, I mean both in the financial sense and in the non-monetary sense. In other words, you might do a job for a charity or for a not-for-profit organization, or you might do it because it is a job that will “profit” you in terms of exposure and recognition. The profit in all these cases is not financial. Rather it is to do with an intellectual or an intangible profit, such as the satisfaction that comes from helping others. But, in the term’s strictly financial sense, it means not losing money on a job and showing a cash profit. If you want to survive in the design business and be able to pay your taxes, your staff and yourself, you are going to have to show a profit on most of your jobs, not necessarily on every job, but you are going to have to make more money than you spend. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it has a blunt simplicity that, at least, is easily grasped by the financially unsophisticated.

3 Is the project newsworthy? What I’m talking about here is your work’s ability to attract attention, and, as a consequence of that attention, attract other work. In the current design scene nothing succeeds like success. It gets people talking ( word of mouth), it excites journalists and commentators (exposure) and it wins awards and gets published in books and exhibitions (recognition). Of course, to succeed as a designer, you need to be efficient, pleasant to work with and utterly professional. But this alone will only get you so far. What really lights the blue touchpaper is great work.

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