Would reviewing design work be a fundamental question?

Question

I recently created a new proposal on Area 51 for an Stack Exchange site called Design Review, which is meant to be an equivelent of SE's Code Review site. I put a lot of thought into the range of questions that could be asked on the site. A lot of it would not necessary be limited to graphic design, but all design, which would include somebody's final rendering of a 3D design, their layout of formal letters or resumes, and even a question such as 'how to make a night-time scene dark but visible in a drawing' or 'how to make my artwork look more scary/fast/quiet/1980s'. In a sense I think I conveyed my proposal as a Q&A site on Visual Communication.

Then I had a bit more thought about what the Graphic Design site is about and perhaps when this site was initially conceived, the intent was to be like my proposal. Also, such critique questions are generally valid here, as has been discussed before.

However, with so many questions regarding the software used to make these designs, which I believe do have their place on this site, it is easy to forget that questions regarding the design process are okay. Which is why I use the word fundamental in my question title. Also with most users like myself coming from Stack Overflow and that design is a fairly subjective topic, that having a technical question may seem like a requirement.

Answer 1

I think the specific enough to be answerable, general enough to apply to more than one case approach is what we should aim for here:

• "Please Review My Design" is not a question with a simple, single best answer.
• "Can I justify using Comic Sans in this kids' flyer?" is a question that can feature a specific design as an example, and answering the question can cover both the general case as well as commenting on the example given.

Answer 2

I find these questions very interesting, but I think their main problem is that they don't exactly fit with the Q&A format, and you usually end up with a long list of reasonable suggestions but no final answer.

The challenge would be to make these questions broad enough to be useful for a larger audience. The UX stack is quite good in this sense, because its questions/answers are generally well formatted to be a reference for other people with similar problems. They usually only focus on a particular issue.

I would be happy to see more questions like "How to make a night-time scene dark but visible in a drawing". They are fundamental for me in the sense that we are lacking some passion to overcome the "how to" questions. Unfortunately, wiki-style or opinion-based ones (and I think "How to make my artwork look more scary" would fall in this category) would result in unanswered or non-constructive questions.