The most important part of any project- Feedback
What is the importance of feedback in the design process?
No designer is going to be able to magically produce the exact design you had in mind without feedback. Without feedback, designers shoot in the dark, and without direction, we could be shooting in the exact opposite direction that you had in mind. In any design project designers will give you a project schedule including multiple rounds of drafts and opportunities to provide feedback. Your designer will let you know what kind of feedback they all looking for at that time because not all feedback is useful at certain points in the project. Do your best to stick to the feedback topics your designer is asking for to make sure your project stays on schedule. Giving too much feedback, confusing feedback, or irrelevant feedback based on the draft you are on, can cause your project to be delayed.
Tips for providing feedback:
Know the direction you want to move in before talking to the designer. Take the time to consolidate feedback from your team before including the designer. When many people are commenting on a draft individually the designer may receive conflicting feedback, or become confused by the many voices and opinions.
Always direct feedback at the design and not the designer. Using terms like “no offense but, “ using but negates whatever you said before it.
DO say “ Using a rich blue on top of orange is hard to read. Can we use a neutral copy color?
DO NOT SAY “ no offense but my kid could make something better.”Note the things you feel need improvement, but you may not know all of the solutions. For example, you find the overlapping text and photo hard to read. Let the designer find the best way to separate those.
There are many ways to provide feedback, I personally prefer an email so that I can work through the feedback at my pace, and have an email trail. However, I have found that often times my clients prefer to hop on a Zoom call and I will share my screen as I make real-time edits. In this case, often times we will run into problems that I will need to make a note of and come back to because it would take more time than what we scheduled. An email for these types of edits in important. You can also print the draft and write on it, or make digital notes on a PDF.
No matter how you decide to provide feedback, keep it direct, non-personal and in one place. Having an email chain with all the feedback in one place works well.
Be descriptive!
Phrases like “ I don’t know why, but I don’t like it.” , “I’ll know it when I see it.” or “ Make it more creative.” do not point a designer any closer to what you do want.
You can take the time to show you friends and family to figure out exactly what you do not like before providing feedback. Do some research and find a design you feel is closer to what you are looking for and KNOW WHY you would be happier with that design. For example, good feedback looks like “ I found this logo online, I love the thicker lines and economic icon. I would like to move away from the thin and detailed design because I do not think it will scale well on our business cards.”Tell your designer what you DO like. If you spend the whole time noting how much needs to change, your designer might accidentally change something you did like. If there is nothing that you like, you need to have a different discussion and reset. Again, come in to that meeting with very clear directions of what you have in mind.
The main point in providing feedback is to be direct, clear and make sure you know exactly what you want. If you do not know how to tell someone what you want, you are setting them up for failure.
Check out my article about determining if you are ready to hire a designer to figure out if you have enough information to direct a designer to create your project!