My mentor said my portfolio was 'too safe' and I finally get why now

I showed my portfolio to a senior designer at a coffee shop in Austin last week and he said every project looked like it was designed by committee. Now I'm going back to add the weird risky concepts I scrapped first round, anyone else hold back their real ideas too much?

3 comments

3 Comments

wadeyoung10d ago

Yeah, safe work always feels like it was proofread to death.

reeseanderson10d ago

Does this mean we're so busy polishing things that we forget what actually made them interesting in the first place? I see it everywhere now, like music that's been autotuned into a flat line or social media posts that get edited until they lose their personality. It's like we're scared to leave any rough edges because someone might call them mistakes.

lucas15910d ago

Is it just me or has everything started to feel like it came out of the same machine? I noticed it with some old home recordings I found from a few years back. They were rough, sure, and the levels were all over the place, but there was this energy to them that I just can't get back now that I know how to use all the editing tools. Now I spend way too much time trying to fix every tiny crack in my voice or make sure the timing is perfect, and by the end I've sucked the life right out of it. It's the same way I see with writing too, where every sentence gets sanded down until it reads like a manual instead of anything someone would actually say. We're trading character for correctness and I'm not sure it's a fair swap.