With branding and advertising comes a wide audience, an audience that grows eager to see what your brand can do. But that also has the side-effect of stifling your creativity in favor of pleasing the audience you worked so hard to gain. Especially if the platform you’re on is a platform that warrants that kind of behavior. This can get really tiring if all you’re looking to do is spread your creative juices for everyone to see and nothing more.
Part of this experience comes in the form of Constructive Criticism. In its literal definition, Constructive Criticism is a form of criticism that “focuses on providing constructive feedback, supported by specific examples, to help you improve in some area.“, in other words, a form of feedback that allows you to see the flaws of your work and where you can improve from the lens of another person in a friendly manner. Inherently, there’s nothing particularly wrong with this as it provides a sense of connection between the creator and the audience. The problem arises when some use this form of criticism as a means to hide the fact that they’re simply being negative about your piece or cracking jokes about what it is. A form of fun that does nothing but undermine your hard work in favor of getting in a few cheap lols here and there. As far as the creator is concerned, the comments provided by the audience in terms of criticism and feedback can be both a blessing and a curse, while it provides a sense of connection as stated earlier, it can also be detrimental to their growth. The ones who take the feedback may also potentially be the ones who will rely on it to get better, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it can be demoralizing when someone looks at your work, just simply says “It’s bad” and call it a day. Not only does it not help in making you see what’s wrong, but it also makes you not want to do another one out of fear that it would end up the same way.
This fits perfectly with the desire for attention and creative burn-out, two separate traps that many creators have fallen victim to many times on different platforms. Let’s use YouTube as an example instead of Twitter this time since it’s the only other platform where creativity is put on full display, especially when it’s in video format. Once you put out enough content for people to sink their teeth into and give their feedback, you start to get this sense that you’re needed in a way, that you’re required to put out more content solely for the need of the audience. At that point the easiest thing to do to remedy this is to look towards the feedback and just assume that what your doing is good and to keep providing it in hopes that those people continue coming back. This sets off the desire for attention, especially with the idea that YouTube has a strange algorithm that favors videos with higher engagement and user feedback. One look at your content compared to the ones on the site’s recommended page or, more similarly, Twitter’s trending page and thus begins the cycle to being good enough to be on there, which all involves attention from your audience. All of this leads into creative burn-out, a mindset that continues to grow throughout your branding experience. To its definition, “Creative burnout is the feeling that you’ve drained all of your creativity, and there is nothing left.“, and this only exacerbated by the idea of having an audience that is constantly eager to see you creative expression. When you have that mass appeal, your creativity will often either plateau or just completely plummet since you’re doing it for the crowd as opposed to yourself. That then leaves you feeling like you’re wasting your potential but still need to keep pumping them out otherwise your audience will lose interest and you lose that recognition you had before. Which then inclines you to stop, whether to focus on work for yourself or on your own mental health or anything else that may be hindering you.
All this to say that social media’s influence on design and animation has its negative areas, both of which connect with each other. Not only with the desire to keep going and keep the audience you have but also the deep-seated reliance on criticism and feedback.
Bryan's Graphic Journey 