5 Rules for Great Design Feedback
You’ve been here before: artwork has been set in front of you and you’ve been asked to respond. You struggle with the wide-open question, “What do you think?” But you don’t have to struggle to give great feedback if you keep in mind these five simple ideas:
1 – Stay in touch with your emotions
Graphic design seeks an emotional response, so share how you feel about a design. If a design leaves you cold, then tell your designer, “it leaves me cold.” If you feel warm and fuzzy gazing at a logo, say “the logo makes me feel warm and fuzzy.” Don’t try to figure out how to ‘fix’ the design. Don’t talk about specific changes you want made. Modification is the province of your designer. But by all means, share how you feel — or how you’d like to feel.
2 – Use adjectives, not nouns
Adjectives give designers direction so fill your feedback with them. Terms like “warmer,” “softer,” “simpler,” “chilly,” “informal,” “light-hearted,” “serious,” “sharper,” help much more than nouns and verbs. Words like “puppy,” “compass,” “race car,” “flower,” etc., are overly specific. Nouns start dictating objects to designers, when the role of design is to elicit emotion not portray objects (that’s a job for an illustrator, not a designer). Nouns are the meat and potatoes of clip art. Design, in contrast, uses symbolism and abstraction to elicit emotion in a viewer.
3 – Keep business goals front and center
There’s always one person on a review committee who sees a logo using the color brown and says, “I don’t like it. I hate brown. Red is my favorite color. I think you should use red.” But what matters are the goals of the business, not an individual’s taste. If this is design for a brownie bakery or a cardboard box maker, then there is a case to be made for the color brown. Or, if six major competitors already use red for their color, then no matter that a person loves red, red is a bad color choice for this project. Everyone has personal tastes but great feedback always aligns your commentary with business goals and project goals — not just your personal esthetic.
4 – Play to your strengths: Words
Some people are skilled with numbers (accountants). Some people are wonderful with crowds (politicians). Some people are nimble with imagery (designers). But just about everyone is good with language. So use words, not drawings, to respond to a designer. Resist your temptation to grab a pencil and draw something for your designer. Just as you wouldn’t take the wrench out of your plumber’s hands or specify which court motion to file by your lawyer, likewise you shouldn’t start drawing for your designer. If you’re certain you yourself are skilled with visual design, then you should have hired yourself as the designer. Otherwise, stick to using words to communicate and leave aside the pen and paper.
5 – Ask, don’t tell
If you don’t understand something about a design, ask your designer “Why did you do that?” And then weigh the answers you hear against your project goals. Avoid asking leading questions such as “Can we make it bigger?” or “Can we fill this space here with text?” Replacing one arbitrary design move with another is counterproductive; it weakens the design and lessens its impact. Both you and your designer need to have good reasons for every design decision. Use “Why?” questions whenever you’re unsure about something in a design.
