Why good design must be opinionated.
On dealing with the trust we’re given, and why saying ‘no’ is a gift we offer our clients.
As designers, we want to create work that helps our customers and makes their lives better. Sometimes, though, we encounter barriers and struggle to get our voices heard. Colleagues or clients will reject ideas we consider valid, and it results in projects not living up to their full potential — with our customers being the ones who take the loss.
It is our responsibility to identify these scenarios and stand our ground, arguing in favor of our expertise and experience to lead projects towards good design.
A brief look back
Designers are in a strange place right now. Our profession started off in the 1960s and 1970s by acting and being perceived as connectors between people, generalists with the capacity to understand each involved field enough to bridge them together.
With the advent of the dot com boom, the 1990s and 2000s brought a huge influx of demand, and with it, a new generation of designers. They lacked the education and the role models needed to understand their role. Designers, as a whole, gained a reputation for being mere pixel-pushers. Clients saw us as the guys and girls making pretty visuals and not much beyond that.
We’ve been making a strong comeback in the past few years. Across the board, we’ve gained a better understanding of our worth and a higher capacity to deliver value to businesses and people. Together with better methods and processes to collaborate with others, from developers to writers and strategists, we’ve established a clear place for ourselves within the new business ecosystem.
So why, then, do we still face pushback?
Our difficulty in managing trust
I grew up as part of that new generation of designers. As a junior, the most important things I had to learn were never tied to aesthetics, which everyone was championing at the time. They were about two simple things: talking, and understanding. They have helped me design better more than anything else.
It’s not surprising when you realize these are the very same skills that are critical to another profession: consultancy. To be a good consultant, you must ask a lot of questions, talk to a lot of people, read between the lines, and craft a strategy from the insights you have gathered. Sounds familiar?
We talk a lot about how we should be perceived more as consultants and yet we fail to notice the one critical thing they always do better than us: Accepting the trust they’re given.
Designers have an issue with trust. It’s not that we don’t work for it — these days, to be a designer at the top of your game you have to design, code, write, sell, empathise, facilitate, and so on — it’s that we find it difficult to understand the full breadth of the responsibility we’re given.
What matters for clients is knowing that they’ve placed their trust in the right people. When we reward their confidence by continually asking for permission, we leave an impression that we’re just not that great at what we do.
We’re creators. By definition, we struggle with issues of self-worth and anxiety. That makes it difficult for us to manage trust. We perceive it more as asking for permission to do good work rather than assuming the responsibility to do it.
For clients, our reasons are of little importance. What matters for them is knowing that they’ve placed their trust in the right people. When we reward their confidence in us by continually asking for permission — whether by indecision, lack of pushback, or no clear opinions — we leave an impression that we’re just not that great at what we do.
Confidence begets confidence. Trust, thus, becomes the last ingredient for creating good design.
On earning and rewarding trust
I don’t mean to argue that we deserve trust by default, or that we should charge forward brazenly thinking that whatever we deliver will work. Achieving good design is a complex process. Over the years, over the tens and hundreds of projects we work on, we gain a better understanding of what it means to deliver something good.
Experience, whether you’re an expert or a generalist, teaches you to better understand the full breadth of a project, and how to set expectations, manage resources, and establish limits — while clearly communicating all of them. These are all the hallmark of a mature professional.
If you’ve done your research and you have arguments that you’re heading in the right direction, then you should fight for what you believe in. Your opinion matters.
When you devote yourself to a project, you have all that experience and expertise backing you up, building a solid foundation on which you can apply your skills. Use that foundation to position yourself as an opinionated consultant from the start, and have confidence in yourself — you have a valuable set of skills that people want.
Be confident in standing your ground when clients push back. If you’ve done your research and you have arguments that you’re heading in the right direction, then you should fight for what you believe in. After all, you’ve been hired to fulfill that role.
Over time, you’ll learn to separate good feedback from useless suggestions. Incorporate what’s useful into your work, and don’t cave in to pressure that would erode its benefits to consumers. Your opinion matters.
If your client is reasonable, they’ll see where you’re coming from. After all, you have their best interest in mind, and it’s only understandable that whatever you’re proposing is meant to help them reach their goals.
If they refuse to listen, then that’s a red flag. It’s a situation you’ll encounter many times across the course of your career, and you’ll have to develop a threshold for yourself: how much erosion will you accept before you issue an ultimatum, that anything further will simply lead to bad work that you’re unwilling to do?
It’s a fine line, and nothing will make you better at walking it than saying ‘no’ or ‘yes’ and seeing what happens. The lessons you take will help you make better decisions next time.
Not just a designer — an opinion leader
Each project you complete makes you a better designer. It’s difficult to see how you’ve developed over the years — since you see your work daily — but the increasing value and expertise you bring clients is visible and felt in the impact of your work. It’s also reflected in the increasing trust that clients place in you.
You have to learn how to better accept the trust you’re offered — and how to build the necessary confidence to reward it. It may feel unnatural; that’s normal. You might be anxious about it; that’s ok, we all feel that. As long as you keep an open mind, focus on people, and lead your projects to the end, you will create good design.
Dan Baciu is the co-founder and principal designer of studio~humm, where he aims to do good work with good people. He gets trusted to say ‘no’ and ‘what if’ a lot. You can reach out to him at dan@studiohumm.com; he has the weird habit of replying to any question he gets asked.
