Cultivating Design for Greatest Yield

Direction has been given. The seeds have been sown. The project is in motion. You’re looking at the first round of proofs, and a lot of thoughts and feelings are rising within you. You know that you and your team are at a pivotal point in the process, so you want to make sure the project’s growth is proceeding correctly. Here are a few tips that I have learned through the years that will help you to eliminate weeds while cultivating great designs.

Be open minded

This might seem obvious, but it can mean more than you might think. Design preferences are often very subjective, but an experienced designer has reasons for each design decision they make. Find out what they are. It is important to not let personal preferences — either yours or the designer’s — negatively impact the effectiveness of a design. The fact that something looks weird to you might or might not mean that it should be changed. If you make decisions based on your own subjective opinions, you become a focus group of one, and such a small focus group does not represent your market. Design is not as subjective as it seems. Designers are trained with visual and psychological rules that can and should help to mitigate personal subjectivity.

Be specific

Talk in terms of how the design makes you feel. Talk about what you are getting from it or not getting from it. Mention what you see first and last. What stands out and what doesn’t. Designers respond better to too much feedback than they do to not enough. Be specific about what you do and don’t like about it. Blanket statements like, “This doesn’t meet our goals,” or “This is really good,” are fine, but they need to be qualified. Otherwise, designers are shooting in the dark when taking the design to the next stage of the process.

Have a discussion to avoid micromanagement

Chances are, you’re a busy professional and you may only have 10 minutes between the previous meeting and the next. It seems efficient to mark up a printout with a red pen and return it to the designer, but this can lose you time in the long run. Especially during the first few rounds of proofs, cultivating a design requires fluid communication. You have to eliminate the aspects you don’t want without harming the good stuff. Simply dictating changes — move this up a bit, put this over here, make that darker, use Helvetica, etc. — misses the discussion that will accomplish your goals more effectively. To use another metaphor, micromanaging a design is a lot like playing Jenga; you pull out the wrong piece and the whole thing collapses into a mess. Talking with the designer about how you feel about the design and what you both think should or should not be changed can help to make the final piece stronger.

Now and then, approve designs you don’t like

Crazy, right? It is a bit crazy, and it takes a lot of guts, but you don’t have to like a design for it to be effective. Knowing the difference between your tastes and what speaks to your audience can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of any effort, whether it is a website, an ad, a direct mailpiece, a package, or what have you. Once you cross this hurdle, you may find your tastes aligning more with effectiveness, so each time you do it, you will get better at it. This is something that I experienced as I learned to be a designer, but I still have to relegate my tastes to the back seat when I design.

Avoid design by committee at all costs

Your peers provide another challenge that you have to navigate in order to cultivate effective design. It’s natural to want to test designs by getting their feedback. But trying to cultivate designs by getting everyone’s approval and input can lead to disastrous results. Here is why.

First, everyone has an opinion, and they can be as various as the colors of the rainbow. Imagine one person’s opinion as yellow. Another’s is green. A third’s is blue, and so on. When you mix all these colors together, you’re not going to get a bright, strong color. You’re going to get something very muddy and indistinct. Similarly, if you try to incorporate the feedback from a group of peers, the resulting design has increased chances of being very blah. If a design is strong, it is going to evoke strong responses. Some will like it; some will hate it. That’s a good thing. If you want to get responses from your peers, make sure you read them in the broadest terms, like how they feel about the design; not in specifics, such as exact positioning of elements.

Second, if you make revisions based on a committee, you can end up with an incohesive design. One person likes this font; another likes a different one. One likes purple; another likes gray. One likes bullets; another likes bursts. Unless you’re trying to make Frankenstein’s monster, this is not the way develop a project. Keep the design strong by limiting the number of people who have influence. This puts more burden on you, but that will force you to grow too.

Stand behind your decisions

Just about everyone has a boss — unless you’re the CEO, someone above you has the responsibility of steering the company and its brands in the correct direction. So you may not have final say with respect to design. But you can give a strong presentation of the work that you and your team creates. If you present it passively, your superior is going to assume that they need to take a more active role. And if you immediately back down every time your superior tells you they don’t like something, you are not going to earn the respect of that person, and they will value your opinion less. So be more than just a messenger who carries a design to the big boss and then carries their response back. Provide project context. If presenting multiple ideas, say something strategic about what you think about each idea. When you can, and when appropriate, stand up for what you believe in, and know why you believe in it.

Keep on learning

In order to become a more effective leader of a creative team, you need to be able to change. The more you learn, the more you can challenge your team, the more you can understand where they are coming from, and the more you can achieve positive results with your superiors and with your customers. Designers might get annoyed if you just start using design lingo, but if you truly know what you are talking about, they will respect you more, and you’ll be able to get more from them.