Subjectively Objective: Reviewing Design as a Client and a Designer
Start your review with a couple of questions:
- Do I like this design?
- Does this design solve the problem?
If the answer to both questions is yes, it’s a great design.
If the answer to the first is no and the second is yes, it works; let’s re-reason.
If the first is yes and the second is no, let’s rethink.
If both are answered no, let’s restart.
Stay with me. I promise this is going somewhere…
Audience Reaction vs. Authorial Intent
Imagine you’re in an art museum. You stroll past the Impressionism gallery dotted with light reflecting off a gentle pond, appreciate the pop art traveling exhibit filled with bright colors and halftone texture, and step into the abstract expressionism gallery. Now you’re in front of a grand gestural painting—an eight-foot-tall canvas covered in long brushstrokes in bright cadmium orange and alizarin crimson with short brushstrokes of phthalo green that spike at random intervals. On top of the field of brushstrokes, an elegant swoop of primary yellow cuts through the canvas from the top left to the right middle.
You lean over to the plaque next to the painting and read the title: “Happiness.”
First you think, I could probably make this myself. Then you decide, I don’t get it.
Would it help if you had the artist’s description of their work to consider?
“To me, happiness is a warm spring day at my grandparents house. We played outside in the field behind their house and caught tadpoles in the creek. Lounging in the grass, watching warm colors dance on the back of my eyelids inspired this work.”
Okay, you ponder, now that makes sense. The sun is red, orange, and yellow. Yes, grass is green. I can imagine that feeling from a similar experience and see those colors in my mind's eye. Too bad I hate orange.
Feeling & Function
We take a similar approach when talking about design, art’s cousin once removed on its mother’s side.
The first thing any of us—“us” as in humans, not “us” as in designers—do when we encounter a new design is feel something. Then, seconds later, we examine the function of the piece. We react and respond. And if the work did its job, both the reaction and the response are strategic.
Feelings and functions are driven by design fundamentals like hierarchy, scale, color theory, etc. All of these ingredients bake together to force feeling and function onto an audience. For our metaphorical design pastry to taste great, we, the bakers, must understand the difference between objective and subjective criticism.
Subjective feedback is personal. These are thoughts modified by bias, like views, experience, or background. Meanwhile, objective feedback is analytical. These considerations attempt to be free of distortions, like personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations. And the line between subjective and objective feedback can be blurry.
Both are valuable, but identifying which is which in rounds of feedback is crucial to crafting effective design. This is just as true on the side of the designer as it is on the side of the client.
Pretty Kitty
Let’s see everything in action.
Say we’re designing a logo for a cat clothing line and the owner gave us these instructions:
- The logo must be playful.
- The logo must attract the audience of females ages 18–35
- The logo must include the tagline “Purrfect Peets.”
We already have approval on the vector (it’s adorable), and now we’re in color palette land. We have three distinct color palettes each with its reasoning for why those colors were chosen:
- Palette #1’s main colors are blue and yellow. The objective reasoning is that cats can see blue and yellow hues better than any other colors.
- Palette #2’s main colors are avocado green and mod magenta. The objective reasoning is the chosen logo design includes a rounded, playful geometric sans serif font inspired by 1960s Pop Art-style wallpaper.
- Palette #3’s main colors are black, white, and orange. The objective reasoning is that cat coat colors are varied, but most will be one of those colors or a shade or tint of one or more of those three colors.
Mark the task done and send the color palette presentation to the client. Now we play the feedback waiting game…
That was quick. Here's the feedback: “We like palette #1 and love using a color palette that cats can see (fact) but can the blue be swapped to pink, because blue was the color of the rival college water polo team (bias)?”
We could just say yes and give the client what they want. They’re paying, after all. However, they’re not paying for your designs; they’re paying for your expertise (that’s a whole other blog, which we’ll write some other time). So, let’s return to our objective reasoning, leverage the client’s subjective feedback, and solve the problem.
What if we tried another hue of blue that complements the yellow? Something that isn’t too close to the color of the rival college water polo team? Since we are aiming for the cat-vision-friendly color palette, it only makes objective sense as blue and yellow. And if we really want to include pink as a supporting color, we can explore it.
We like what we like, and that seeps into the work and how we discuss it. Here’s the but (underlined because it’s important): subjective feedback also has a place in design discussions. We mustn’t forget the intended audience. They have their set of biases to consider. If the audience doesn’t buy (or buy in), that’s a problem. Perhaps some lines are best left blurry.