How To Best Respond To Design Feedback
(Especially When It Hurts)
In the movie “Groundhog Day”, Bill Murray’s self-centered character (Phil Connors) lived the same day over and over again until he finally got it right. Eventually, he knew exactly what to expect and how to react accordingly to every conflict on that given day.
Design feedback is sort of like that. You know it’s coming, but more often than not, you don’t want to hear it. Even if your baby is inherently ugly…love can be blind.
Responding appropriately to design feedback is so critical in the workplace because it has a direct impact on the culture you share and create with your co-workers. It also has a profound affect (positive or negative) on your personal brand that follows you like a shadow. It could very well be the one thing that holds you back (or moves you forward) when it comes to that promotion or pay increase you’ve been working so diligently toward.
With that, please allow me to share what I’ve learned in my 20+ professional years of receiving design feedback. Hopefully, you will learn a thing or two from my groundhog days that I’m still trying to perfect.
By the time you’re done reading this, you will have a much better grasp on how to respond in a healthy and professional way to design feedback whether it’s coming from your creative director, a client, or from your project manager (who’s really the messenger in these cases).
Pro-tip: Don’t shoot the messenger!
1) Don’t Be Reactive
This first step is actually the most important. Reacting to creative input defensively and emotionally is the equivalent to waving the white flag (or maybe pink slip) of defeat in your current work as a professional designer.
Since you already know it’s coming, take some time to digest what is addressed. Let it marinate. Even though:
- You’re intimately acquainted with the work
- You put your heart & soul into that design
- You worked really hard to meet your deadline
- You’re freakin’ tired and emotionally spent, man!
In this common scenario, your natural reaction will be to immediately confront the messenger and challenge the feedback on the spot.
Just don’t.
Go back to your desk (or get off the phone) and think it through. Take some deep breaths (in through the nose, out through the mouth), and regroup on it after you’ve had some time to process and really let it all sink in.
Often, the feedback (even if it’s two unformatted ASCII bullet notepad pages worth) ends up being a lot less arduous than you may have initially thought it would be.
2) Don’t Get Too Attached
When passionate designers create something, we reach deep within and craft a work that is intrinsically a part of us. What is formed comes from years and years of exposure to things that made us feel something strongly enough for our brains to store for later use.
Whether it’s designs that have inspired us greatly, a sign in the mall, pinnacle life experiences like a first date, or even the first time riding a bike without training wheels.
All these real emotions that are a deep part of who we are become collectives that we conjure up when we design. So, of course we’re attached to our designs, they are an extension of who we are!
When we put our heart and soul into our designs, we birth a life we naturally care deeply about (and may even be willing to die for).
Since we birth life that is literally a part of us — we must realize that in design, the life we create is often like a conjoined twin that must be separated from us through surgical means.
Even if “Dr. Peppers” is the surgeon–we often must be separated from the life we created for both ourselves and our design to truly thrive in the real world.
Our work is a part of us, but we are not our work.
So temper the separation anxiety, and allow that separation surgery. You will be better for both.
- Be willing to “kill your darlings”
- Serve your client and solve their problems first
- Build a sweet portfolio…last
If you do the second one really well, the third will take care of itself.
3) Look At It As An Opportunity To Make The Work Better
People exercise to become stronger and gain endurance.
In order to gain muscle growth, we must put a greater load of stress onto ourselves than we have previously adapted to. Our muscles grow as they heal from that added stress.
With consistency, we will be able to bear progressively heavier stress than we ever have before.
As a designer, you should constantly be seeking to become stronger in your craft. The best way to muscle through the resistance brought on by design feedback, is to sweat it out!
Pretty soon you’ll be able to say, hey I need a spot for this 200lbs of:
“That’s too abstract”
OR
I can’t wait to curl 85lbs of:
“The stakeholder doesn’t like blue”
Hopefully by the time you’re done reading this, you will actually look forward to the next design critique so you can hit the “Make the Logo Bigger” gym and tone that professional designer glute of yours!
Even though I had a little fun accentuating above, the truth is in my experience: 9 times out of 10, the feedback you’ll get (if you’re working with sane, rational humans) will actually make the final work better and you’ll be grateful for it in the end.
4) It’s Okay To Stick To Your Guns
As long as you’re not shooting blanks.
Look, none of us would ever tell a pool cleaner how to clean our pool, or a chimney sweep how to sweep our chimney right? So, after “Tony Little-ing” our way to greater designer physique (sans the perm-mullet), we naturally get in much better shape to confidently defend what we see as specific critical design elements.
Remember, you’re the design expert — and if you’re working with other industry experts (and hopefully you are, or you can exercise your ‘at-will’ and go somewhere you ‘at-will’ be), in the same way you’re expecting to get design feedback, they are expecting you as the design expert to defend your design decisions.
The key to the kingdom is knowing the right hills to die on. And knowing is half the battle (G.I. Joe!). Seriously though, what sounds better…dying on Hob Knob Hill or on Hamburger Hill?
Actually both sound kinda funny. Here’s a few hill-world examples:
Hill A
“Client doesn’t like the font you chose. They really like the sleekness of ‘Comic Papyrus’. Can you replace with a font comparable to that instead?”
Hill B
“I know the logo is blue and black, but the client really prefers orange and green for the background and accent colors of the website.”
Hill C
“Client knows flat design is in, but is a big J.J. Abrams fan and would like to see lens flare on the hero image, as well as some drop shadow to give it depth.”
Hill D
“I know you were going for abstract design, but the client just doesn’t get it.”
So, which hill do you die on? If you chose Hill B, you chose well my friend. Even the lens-flare and drop-shadow can be finessed using subtlety without selling your soul. The abstract issue is a tough one and could possibly bring you back to the drawing board, but, “yay subjectivity”!
Bottom line: If you really feel led to fight for specific critical elements in your design that you’re feeling pushed back on — have a really compelling reason why and design-rationale for it.
Then (most importantly)…present it tactfully and respectfully.
5) Be Grateful
When I first disovered the Interwebs in ’96 (thanks AOL) and created my first web page using probably a minimum of four animated .gif’s, I knew that’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life…instead of putting pager crystals in dope baggies.
Three years later after persistently trying to get my foot in the door, I landed my first dream job at a premiere ad agency in Orange County, CA as an Interactive Art Director.
I received an offer letter to make more money than I’ve ever made for sitting down at a desk in front of a state-of-the-art Dell computer in a very hip, air-conditioned office with lots of incredibly cool and creative people, while gaining experience and exercising design technology in order to solve problems for others.
Two+ decades later, I still get paid to do what I love, and to love what I do.
Sound familiar?
We are truly #blessed aren’t we?
Think about how much so the next time the temptation to react negatively to design feedback comes your way.
If all else fails…
Become An Artist
“A designer without a client is an artist.” — Mike Monteiro
In Conclusion
I wish I could tell you that after all this time of being on the receiving end of design feedback, I have arrived and always exercise this recipe for success.
The reality is, I haven’t and I don’t always. I failed hard on Step 1 a few months prior to this writing.
It could’ve cost me my job.
Design is one of the only professional fields that can be so subjective.
Everyone is naturally drawn to certain creative elements/colors/shapes/fonts etc. It’s what the Creator intended when He made us who we are. Consider even our unique fingerprints and DNA molecules. If this were not so and God was a horrible creative, we’d all be driving the same poo-brown colored Ford Pinto’s.
Oh, and we’d be robots.
Getting back to the opening “Groundhog Day” analogy: In the same way Phil Connors was doomed to remain in the same unhappy, unfulfilling rut until he changed his outlook and attitude — we too, until we learn to respond in a healthy way to design feedback, may be doomed to repeat unpleasant situations that negatively affect our personal brand, our culture and our career growth in the place we get to provide for ourselves and our families doing what we love…and loving what we do.
Your ego is not your amigo.
Stay passionate, stay professional…and stay humble my friends!
