Pushed to Perfection
How feedback can push your design further
I’ve been working in the industry of design for roughly 12 years now. During some of my early experiences in doing it as a professional I was let in on a dirty little secret… the client doesn’t always like what you present. I can hear graphic design students everywhere as they shudder at the thought. It’s true, you might think what your presenting is the best work in the world and 9 times out of 10 there is going to be some criticism and feedback from the client.
The question becomes how do you respond to the this? Early on I would put up a fight, I would argue against each and every point they had. Don’t get me wrong, if I feel strongly enough about something they are criticizing I will still go to the gauntlet over it. However, I have learned to listen, something they don’t always teach you in school, but a skill for designers nonetheless. It’s only when you listen from an objective point of view that you can start to get at the heart of their issue. Your client might say they don’t like that color but what they mean is they don’t care for how saturated it is in that usage. Other times the feedback might be more general, something along the lines of your design looking to busy or sparse. It’s important when given a general statement that you follow up and dig deeper into what exactly they feel makes the design busy or sparse.
Recently, I finished a round of concepts for a client that I felt were pretty polished. Internally I had iterated them several times and worked out most of the kinks. During the presentation it was clear they they wanted to go with one of the concepts right away. The client’s early comments were very light, but as the week went on the comments continued to come in and there were 5-6 points that I would need to rethink. Fortunately they weren’t foundational issues, instead they were things that could be solved in refinement of a few details.
If I had chosen to push back on all points I could have probably avoided making a single change, but I would’ve also passed up on a great opportunity to push the design further to perfection. As designers we tend to push ourselves quite a bit, but I have found that there is always a little more we could do. It’s a lot like an orange, you can squeeze 90% of all of its juice with very little effort, but there is always the opportunity to squeeze out those last drops if you try hard enough. Sometimes we can squeeze the last drops of juice out of our design on our own, but many times it will take an outside force to push us to perfection.
Good stuff Harold. Feedback already has been great, I think you nailed all their concerns with this new revision.
Thanks for this. We are a stubborn lot, sometimes.
But you know, it’s not just that we don’t want to make changes (oftentimes they do not take so long) but sometimes client suggestions just aren’t very good ideas.
And it’s our job to say so.
You’re right on the money though, Harold, in that we need to get to the root of the ‘problems’ not just deal with the symptoms.
‘Make the logo bigger’ can often be understood as ‘We would like to increase the presence of our identity.’
Oh. OK!
But overall, yeah… it’s good to get pushed a little.
Steve: Your exactly right, I find that part of our job is a filter between what the client is “saying” and what they really need. Sometimes only half of what a client says is something we should implement, other times it can be much less than that.
I would add that a big part of this is also being able to articulate why we did or did not do something they asked for.
“It’s a lot like an orange, you can squeeze 90% of all of its juice with very little effort, but there is always the opportunity to squeeze out those last drops if you try hard enough.”
That’s a great analogy.