Mike Morris — Listener, Thinker, Designer

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 what 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.

If you are in charge of designers for any reason, you are probably responsible for giving design direction. Whether you are an art director, a businessperson who has hired an independent designer, or a manager who has designers under them, you can give useful design direction. I’ve been on both sides of the equation, so I have learned a bit about both giving and receiving direction. A book could easily be written on the topic, but here are a few ideas.

Be Prepared

There’s nothing worse than meeting with a designer or design team without knowing what you want from them. What you want largely depends on your role — how much creative input you need, what types of decisions you want designers to make, what aspects of the design are flexible and what should be taken as given — you will get the most valuable output when you define parameters most clearly. Without clear parameters the results you get will be determined by the designer’s assumed parameters. The results could be too narrowly constrained to hit the mark, or too widely spread to have effective impact. So start out by knowing what you want.

Be specific, but encourage coloring outside the lines

When you’re prepared, you know the parameters of the project. Now you need to convey those parameters. Designers are not inspired by jargon. Exhortations such as “Think outside the box,” “Show me cutting-edge,” “Knock our socks off,” and “Be creative,” are not helpful to designers. These instructions are akin to telling an accountant to make sure the numbers are accurate. Lay out the project goals — are you looking for newsletter subscribers, visitors to your store or site, attendees at an event? Provide the designer with budget and time constraints. Talk about how the brand should be handled. Ask the designer to think of the best ways to meet those goals. Tell them what you don’t want. If you have a specific approach in mind, share it, but I suggest leaving the door open for different ideas.

Use examples

It is not always easy to describe what you want in a design. Sometimes it is hard to simply know what you want. One of the best ways to communicate what you want is through examples. I’m not suggesting that you have a designer copy another design, though often one design approach can be adapted for a different purpose. I’m suggesting that you know what you want ahead of time. It is your job to coach the designers who will be creating the design, and a coach never says to their team, “I don’t know what I want you to do, but I’ll know it when I see it. So go out there and win!” That’s not coaching, and it’s no help to the team. So have examples that communicate your tastes. You can have designers bring examples of what they see as effective and you can respond, but what if they don’t bring anything that you like? Ultimately, in order to save time, money, and frustration, it is up to you to communicate what you want in a meaningful way.

Appoint a leader

If you are leading a team, but you are not a designer and/or you do not want to be involved in each small decision the team makes on a project, then you need a project leader. Without a leader, each member of the team will tend to do their own thing — for example, they may decide to create designs individually and present them all to you rather than work together. Sometimes this is desirable; sometimes it is not. Having a leader will help the team to focus, and each person on the team will know their role for the given project. It will also give the team leader important leadership experience. By having a different leader on different projects, you will strengthen your team collectively and the members individually.

Listen

Questions and comments in response to your direction can be very informative. They can tell you what directions the designer is thinking of going, and whether or not they understand the goals of the project. They can also inform your direction and decision-making process. However prepared you are, creative people often have ideas that can add something valuable to the project, so be ready for that. You are creative too, and fostering the synergistic development of ideas is part of leadership.

Respond

After direction has been given and the designers have been set free to create, you will need to respond to that creation. Much like a farmer who has planted seeds, you will have to weed out the bad and cultivate the good. And that cultivation is just as important as the initial planting of ideas. My next post will be devoted to this process