Am I Industry-Ready?
Am I Industry-Ready? is a free self-assessment for digital illustrators and concept artists. It maps 390 skills across nine stages — drawing foundations through integration — as an interactive map and checklist. Checking skills produces an honest verdict: your rank, your artist type, and coaching computed from your own gaps. Every skill has its own page explaining what it is, why it matters, and how to tell you can do it consistently.
Problem
Beginner artists can't tell how far they are from professional work. The curriculum is scattered across courses, forums, and YouTube; feedback is vague ('keep practicing'); and there is no structured way to see which specific skills are missing.
Approach
Condensed the concept-art curriculum into a 390-skill tree across nine stages, rendered as an interactive map with a checklist that stores progress in the browser — no account. A verdict engine turns checks into a rank, an artist type, and coaching lines computed from the user's own gaps. Each skill page pairs plain-language explanations with observable 'you can…' signals and related skills picked holistically across the whole map.
Key Features
- Interactive skill map and checklist: 390 skills, 9 stages, 10 ranks
- Verdict computed from your own checks: rank, artist type, next-rank coaching
- A page for every skill: what it is, why it matters, and observable 'you can…' signals
- Related skills picked across the whole map, not just neighbors
- No sign-up — progress lives in localStorage
- llms.txt, sitemap, FAQ structured data, and per-page index gating baked in
Outcomes
- All 416 skill pages drafted, edited, and published in a single day through a scripted content pipeline
- Publishing lifecycle gates search indexing per page — drafts render for site users but stay out of the sitemap
- Verdict copy is computed from the user's actual checks instead of canned encouragement
Architecture
Next.js 16 App Router with TypeScript and Tailwind v4; all 426 routes statically generated. Page content lives in per-skill JSON files with a scripted draft-and-review pipeline. Deployed on Vercel with llms.txt, sitemap, and per-page robots gating.