Most design projects that go over budget, over time, or produce disappointing results have a common root cause: poor feedback. Not bad designers — poor feedback. Understanding how to give feedback effectively is one of the highest-leverage skills a business owner can develop when working with creative professionals.
The Core Principle
Your job as the client is to tell the designer what isn't working and why. The designer's job is to solve it. If you tell the designer how to solve it — if you prescribe the solution rather than describe the problem — you're doing the designer's job for them, usually worse than they would, and removing the value you're paying for.
The difference:
- Prescribing (less useful): "Change the font to something thinner"
- Describing the problem (more useful): "The typography feels too heavy — it doesn't match the light, premium tone we're going for"
In the first case, the designer changes the font weight and hands it back. In the second, the designer considers whether the problem is weight, size, letter-spacing, typeface choice, or colour — and solves for the actual issue.
Be Specific About What Isn't Working
"I don't like it" is not feedback. "I love it" is not feedback either. Useful feedback is specific: what element, what quality, what feeling is or isn't working? You don't need design vocabulary — plain language is fine. "The logo feels friendly but we're a professional services firm — we need it to feel more serious" gives a designer something to work with. "I just don't think it's right" gives them nothing.
Separate Personal Preference from Brand Fit
The most common feedback error: confusing what you personally like with what works for the brand. You might personally dislike blue, but if blue is the right choice for a financial services brand targeting conservative institutional clients, your preference is irrelevant. Good clients learn to ask "does this work for the audience and the brand objectives?" rather than "do I like this?"
Consolidate Feedback From All Stakeholders
If multiple people in your organisation need to approve design work, consolidate all feedback into one document before sending it to the designer. Contradictory instructions from multiple stakeholders sent in separate emails are a designer's nightmare — it's impossible to satisfy "make it bolder" and "make it more subtle" simultaneously. One consolidated, internally reconciled document of feedback is a professional standard that saves time and money.
Be Clear About What Is Working
Tell the designer what to keep. "Everything except the colour — I love the layout and the typography" is extremely useful. It prevents the designer from changing things that were already right in an attempt to address the feedback you gave. Without knowing what to preserve, designers often over-revise — changing things you were happy with alongside the things you flagged.
Set a Revision Window
Give feedback once per round, thoroughly, rather than in multiple small instalments. A designer who receives "actually one more thing" emails over three days after giving feedback loses time on context-switching. Review the work carefully, write down all your feedback at once, then send it in a single document.
When Feedback Isn't Working
If you've had multiple revision rounds and the work still isn't landing, the problem might be the brief rather than the execution. Revisit the original brief with the designer — sometimes a misaligned fundamental assumption (about the target audience, the tone, the positioning) means that technically excellent work is solving the wrong problem. Catching this early saves more time than iterating on execution.