Postmortem Project Evaluation: What Is It and How Do You Do It?

Improve your skills, assess the progress you’ve made, and become a better creative through self-critique

When you finish a project, it’s very important to carry out a post-mortem evaluation. This will convert your self-critique into a powerful tool that pushes you to be better. The biggest challenge is having to separate yourself from a project you’ve spent so much time on, stand back, and analyze it objectively.

Designer, illustrator, director, and conceptual artist Nathan Jurevicius (@nathanjurevicius) shares his top tips for productively critiquing your work.

Why do it?

When you evaluate a project post-completion, you are forced to identify the processes behind the parts that, in your opinion, have been the most successful, as well as those that you consider either personal, creative, or professional accomplishments or that could open the door to new opportunities.

Postmortem Project Evaluation: The Process

These are the steps Nathan recommends following when analyzing your own work:

Take a step back

When you finish a long project, your instinct tells you to evaluate it right then and there. Nathan suggests taking a break before beginning to self-critique it: go for a walk, distract yourself, and then come back to the project with fresh eyes. It’s important to do this to get out of your own head and evaluate your work objectively.

Celebrate first!

Celebrate that you have finished the project before you start critiquing it. This will help you carry out your critique from a satisfactory place, having completed your objective.

Be honest

It’s possible to not be completely honest or direct when you examine and judge your own work. For Nathan, the secret is to respond to the following questions: What have I done that I could improve? What are my biggest weaknesses, and how can I work on them? This will help you to carry out a critique with a more realistic and sincere approach.

Keep going

Once you have completed the previous steps, it’s important to know how to advance and move on from the project, as well as return to it. To do so, it’s important to analyze and be conscious of what you have done well so that you can employ the same skills or ideas in the future. At the same time, you need to identify your weaknesses so that, going forward, you can focus on them and improve.

Assess the progress you’ve made

In order to evaluate your work, you need to recognize where you were at before and where you’re at now. To do this, it’s good to maintain a record of your previous projects so that you can objectively analyze how you’ve improved over time or whether your creative or professional development has stagnated.

Final advice

Nathan asserts that it is incredibly important for us to recognize that we are all individuals with strengths and weaknesses in different areas. When you evaluate your work, remember that the purpose of this exercise is personal improvement. It’s good to have references, but be aware that comparing yourself to others can limit, add pressure to, and distort your judgment when evaluating your personal development. Recognize that you are the only person with the power to make yourself better.

If you want to learn more skills for managing your own creativity with Nathan Jurevicius, and you like illustration, sign up to the course, Illustrated Character Design and World Creation, and discover the basic steps to finding inspiration, sketching, and creating.

You may also like:

Domestika Diary: Nathan Jurevicius
The Narrative Visuals of Siames Escalante
Photoshop Tutorial: How to Scan or Import Your Character Sketch