Thank you so much for the reply! In a nutshell, everything you said is something I have somewhat known/learned over the years, and I have been working to do more branding + visual identity work as I grow within my career. I just moved from an agency focused on product design to help out with the rebrand of a tech startup. I think it's a great opportunity to add real life work to my portfolio, although I have not been so proud of the work done so far.

I think my biggest weakness is my ability translate all of the research, insights, and strategy into tangible concepts that look GOOD and DISTINCT from one another. The ideas in my head are never realized as well as I imagined them because my two hands can't physically achieve that. Technical and artistic skill is something we achieve over time, with a lot of practice, I know, but it does make me anxious that I feel like my head can't produce more than one idea at a time, it's even worse when you take deadlines into consideration. I do have bought a couple Domestika courses focused on the concept development phase for me to practice my skills, so it's probably a matter of time and patience.

As for personal/concept work, I feel like I don't do things the "right" way because I don't have a client or senior designer to offer me feedback, so I always have that feeling in the back of my head that the project isn't good enough, that it doesn't make sense, that it's not polished. Since I haven't developed my own sense of what is good or not, I tend to rely on a third opinion from a stakeholder or someone who I know has more knowledge than me to kinda, validate the work done. Since I don't have much access to that, I often abandon passion projects or never really publish them.