Reviewing the last question posted, the people around ask more about tools and application than actual questions on graphic design. Questions about readying a final art, layout, typography composition are really missing here and i really think those are the REAL graphic design questions.
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2I don't disagree with you that we need those other questions, as well, but it's hard to force people to ask those kinds of questions. A low-level promotion on the site could help, but asking those questions yourself is also a good way of bringing those questions to the front page and getting more of them here. If it's helpful, the sudden rush of "How do I do X in Y program" is somewhat recent and sudden. I've been watching this site for almost a year; it hasn't always been this way.– Aarthi StaffCommented Sep 23, 2012 at 19:22
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3 Answers
I couldn't agree more! If there are any burning questions like these you have, please ask them!
Our system's speciality is getting solid concrete answers to clean crisp questions, so people often turn to this site when they are trying to do something specific and get stuck. That's why there's a high proportion of questions that are about problem solving and application. A lot of people have these problems and this site works really well for cutting through noise to get an answer that works.
It's not always easy to turn thoughts and curiosity about more abstract things into crisp questions that can have an accepted answer. Our site's system isn't great for open-ended discussions - they turn into endlessly long lists of people's thoughts and opinions, and the amount of votes any one opinion gets is usually driven more by who got there first than the value of one opinion over another.
But it definitely can be done, and has been done quite a lot (just not as often as we'd like). The way to do is to just do it and make it work. So please do get involved, and ask interesting questions like these and hopefully it'll help to spark things off.
Just keep in mind while writing the question, "What would a correct answer look like? How will I assess which of many differing answers is best and deserves most credit? What criteria will I be judging answers against?"
answered Sep 24, 2012 at 10:32
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user568458's last paragraph here seems crucial. Take a recent question like this one, asked and answered by members with huge reputation scores possibly in response to the Scope Expansion Project here. It's clearly a "great question" (the answers say so) but I cannot see how it has an answer in the traditional Stack Exchange / SO sense. Commented Oct 22, 2012 at 6:58
One could always enrich tool based answers with wider graphic design insights so that non-designer members like me, who are just trying to get a graphic design task done on a tool we are unfamiliar with, get a feel for the wider questions we could be asking.
I've thought to myself that since I've been here it's more often than not just been "SuperUser for Adobe." But I think that's just a consequence of where the users come from (SO and SuperUser, people who don't have design backgrounds but need to do quick and dirty design work in Adobe or its FOSS alternative) and the fact that software questions are more suited to the generalized, Q&A format that we work with.
It seems like when people ask questions that don't involve software, there are a lot of passionate, knowledgeable people who are willing to and do chime in. I believe it'll happen more as we grow and start to attract designers who are coming into the site as designers, not as programmers.
