PE DD Week: A DD is not an award, but a feature.

There. I said it. A DD is not a prestigious award that will change your life drastically, it's just a 24h feature. 

But why is it so important to make this distinction? 

It's just a way of naming something and therefore should not be of great importance, yet it makes all the difference in how people perceive a DD.

As mentioned in the intro, the biggest problem when it comes to Daily Deviations arises with the choice of words used to describe what a Daily Deviaton is. When you call it an award, people will automatically assume that the Daily Deviation is the cream of the crop of every deviation posted ever on this site and that no art featured after it should be able to be perceived as "worse". However, when you call it a feature, most people are fine with the picked deviations and don't even hold them to the high standards of living up and / or overshadowing the previously featured deviations. And yet, behind the terminology the deviations that are featured are still the same.

An award, in most cases, is something given at the end of a competition to the winner. Like the gold medals at the Olympics, or trophies at the end of Wimbledon. What an award is not, however, is something that's given daily to people who aren't even competing in something. To get your art featured site-wide may feel like winning a prize, but it's still just a feature. A daily deviation is nothing more than the name itself implies: it's not a Daily Award or a Daily Prize, it's just a deviation featured for a day. 

So why is a daily deviation a feature then? When your art is picked to be featured, that's pretty much all you get: a day-long feature on the DD-page and in the footer. While it reaches more people than say, being featured in a journal, the idea behind it is pretty much the same. Your art was suggested to someone who thought it looked amazing and who then decided to share it with others. That being said, getting a daily deviation still is something to be proud of, since of all the works on the site, yours was picked to be featured! It still is an achievement that follows up hard work and creativity. To pick up on the analogy with a journal-feature:  where a journal-feature is a bit like a deviant saying "I  like this piece, you should check it out!", a DD is a CV's way of saying that a piece is worth looking at.

1. What do you think the qualities of a good DD are or should be?

2. If you were a CV, how would you choose what to feature and what not?