Advice on handling rejection - not women but 10 years of my career

[Duracell_Bunny]

Has anyone been in a similar situation?

I have been working with the same company since I left college 10 years ago, I've worked my way up to be the website director of a (was) sucessful mail order company.

Recently due to the CD market being replaced by downloads sales have taken a sudden hit and the company is slowly downsizing. Either way all along I have thought if we do go down I can carry on as a web site designer due to my experience - noting that were not just talking nice graphics, the whole UI, hidden tricks that you never notice which encourage you to click 'buy' etc.

As my pay has also taken a decrease, I thought I would do a bit of free lance designing. I came across a site where businesess can pre-pay and host a project, it works a bit like a contest in that they choose the winning design that they would like to use. The winnings can be very substantial.

Although there is a lot of other designers within these socalled contents I did not see any harm in spending 2-3 hours a week.

Here are the results:
I have been ripped to pieces. Every submission I gave the project holder just tears it appart giving it the lowest possible rating. One even saying it looked very amatuar.

Clearly this is a reality check - I do not have a future in what I have been doing all of my career.

I had taken pride in my work, and had a great feeling of satisfaction- yet always evolving my talants.

Its heartbraking to say the least, all my passion has been lost. I've always been the below average guy - in that always finishing last in races, doing terrible at anything competitive.

My work gave me sense of achieivement and skill - now I don't know where I'm going.

This isn't a case of picking myself back up and ironing out the mistakes - its doesn't work like that.

If your curious here is an example of one of my submitted designs - which is apprently a load of bollocks http://imageshack.us/f/843/10621077original.jpg/

Always been fed up in life of being crap at everything, now this.

 

[spider_007]

my only experience with websites...is browsing them. It's not bad. It's clean and organized.....but it needs a bit of flavor.... this example may not be as organized but it has a bit more of a "pop" mint.com

dust your self off....learn from it....see what others are doing, that are better then you.....learn from them.....keep improving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3wuXyOUKJw

 

[Slickster]

Well that design looks pretty good to me.

The banner at the top could use some spicing up and maybe a little more pizzaz on the page itself.

However, from everything I've ever read on web design you don't want to overdo it. Clean and organized is the way to go.

If this organization doesn't like your design I wouldn't take it too hard. It's like judging artwork. Everyone is going to judge things differently.

Don't beat yourself up because one person doesn't like your work. Pay attention to the designs that do work for this guy and try to learn from them.

Your design is very uniform and who knows maybe this guy is looking for something more abstract. It could be as simple as that.

Don't give up!

 

[Duracell_Bunny]

Thanks for your views, I do appreciate what you are saying. It is also nice and unexpected to hear comments from regular internet users rather than from people within the industry.

Unfortunetely it's not just this one design, I have submitted 6 (all different companies with different specifications). All of them have slaughted my work and eliminated me from their contests, one of the project holders had given their reason for elimination as "looks too amateur".

The same sort of thing could happen if I were to apply for a job at web development company.

I beleive there is only so much that can be learnt to a certain extent with web design. The standard constantly evolves depending on internet user's needs for information, culture and the software, the rest is just creativity, which I guess I might be lacking and it's something that cannot be learnt.

 

[backbreaker]

I have been in IT my entire adult life, I sold a custom computer company earlier in my 20's and I still semi run a web development company, so I know to the T what you are going through


let me start with the design. I would not call it amateurish, but it's.. it's cookie cutterish if that makes any sense. It looks like any generic template i can download off template monster if not worse.

This is what you are competing with. This is some of the work of my usual graphic guy I hand all our graphic work to. He's a full time freelancer but he pretty much does all of our higher end stuff now


http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy99/ghostzapper/PeoplesClubMain.jpg

http://www.dopebox.net


http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy99/ghostzapper/17185Main1.jpg


http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy99/ghostzapper/17185Main1.jpg


http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy99/ghostzapper/wineclassifeds.jpg


http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy99/ghostzapper/proof.jpg


http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy99/ghostzapper/pivotnotelayout4.jpg


http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy99/ghostzapper/adventuresLayout.jpg


If you can allow me to be blunt, if you are stuck at that level of design you are going to be behind the 8 ball. Hell I can do that in photo shop and i'm not a graphic designer (at least I'm pretty sure I can, i haven't in a while).


As far as the actual web development business itself... don't get too down on yourself. IF this is what you REALLY want to do, hone your skills. The **** isn't' THAT difficult. espeically talking about graphic design, php/asp work which is about like 70"% of the work out there.

And you stated in the post that you did the work on the website. are you an actual programmer?


my advice would be to pick something, learn it and become very good at it. Teh problem isn't that you suck per say it's that you seem to have tried to become a jack of all trades and mastered none of them, whereas your counterparts mastered a trade and got really good at it and passed you by.


The economy is a little down, even i can tell and for this industry that's nto usual. Even in 08-09 business was good if not up. But if you are good at what you do there will always be work to be found.

 

[Duracell_Bunny]

@backbreaker - thanks.

The example supplied in my first post was based on the clients wireframe, they were pretty firm in their breif.

I'm not an actual programmer, I project manage a team of people. My specialist area is eCommerce, especailly impoving conversion rates, UI and SEO - which I have been very successful with on a handful of sites and campaigns.

I used to work with printed matieral which is where I gained my colour and layout principles. In a way I could say I know what an excellent design is and all the theories, but don't have the ability to acheive the polished/fresh look from an artistic point of view.

I do have some basic programming knowledge but most of this really needs to be refreshed as I took the courses many years back but didn't actually have a need to put it into full practice. My only flufluent knowlage is CSS and JavaScript.