{"course":{"slug":"visual-storytelling","title":"Making It Say Something","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"taking-feedback-without-drowning","title":"\"Make the logo bigger\" is a symptom, not an instruction","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/taking-feedback-without-drowning","position":58,"of":64,"minutes":9,"answer":"People are reliable about what they noticed and unreliable about why, so never argue with an observation and never simply execute a prescription: ask what they were doing when they noticed it, batch the feedback.","keyIdea":"People are reliable about what they noticed and unreliable about why, so never argue with an observation and never simply execute a prescription: ask what they were doing when they noticed it, batch the feedback, and spend your credibility only on what the message depends on."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## Three different things arrive wearing the same clothes\n\nWhen somebody responds to your work, what they say is one of three things, and telling them apart is most of the skill.\n\n- **Observation**: what they noticed or failed to notice. \"I didn't see the phone number.\"\n- **Diagnosis**: their theory about why. \"The phone number is too small.\"\n- **Prescription**: their proposed fix. \"Make the phone number red.\"\n\nNon-designers are **excellent at observation** and unreliable at diagnosis and prescription. They are not being presumptuous by supplying all three; prescription is the only vocabulary they have. \"Make it bigger\" is what \"I did not notice it\" sounds like when you do not have the words *hierarchy* or *contrast*.\n\nThe rule follows directly: **never argue with an observation, and never simply execute a prescription.**\n\nIf they did not see the phone number, they did not see it. That is data and it is not negotiable. Whether the fix is size, weight, position, colour or removing the three things competing with it, is yours to determine, and the actual answer is frequently to delete something else rather than to enlarge the number.\n\n## The one question that does the work\n\n> **\"What were you doing, or looking for, when you noticed that?\"**\n\nThis reliably converts a prescription back into the observation underneath it. \"Make the logo bigger\" becomes one of several quite different problems:\n\n> Figure: What they said, and what is underneath it. The prescription: Make the logo bigger; Make the phone number red; It needs more energy; Can we try a different font. The observation: I could not tell whose this was; I did not see the phone number; Nothing pulled my eye first; Something looks wrong and I cannot say what. Prescription is the only vocabulary most people have. Never argue with an observation, and never simply execute a prescription, because the fix is often to delete something else.\n\n- \"I could not tell at a glance whose this was\": a brand-presence problem, possibly solved by colour or position rather than size.\n- \"My board will ask why the logo is small\": a political problem, and honesty about that changes the conversation entirely.\n- \"It feels unbalanced there\": a composition problem that has nothing to do with the logo.\n\nEach needs a different fix. Enlarging the logo solves the second one and damages the design for the other two.\n\n## Feedback needs a shape, or it eats the project\n\nA trickle of comments across a week is how a design dies by accumulation: each change is reasonable, no one is watching the whole, and the result is a committee artefact nobody chose.\n\nWhat works:\n\n1. **Batch it.** One round, all comments together, from everybody, by a stated date.\n2. **Name who decides.** Not who comments: who decides, when two people want opposite things. Establish this at the brief, because discovering it during round three is how projects stall.\n3. **Set a round count.** \"Two rounds of revisions included\" is a normal professional term and it protects both sides.\n4. **Ask for problems, not solutions.** Say it explicitly when you send the work: \"tell me what does not work or what you did not notice, and leave the fixes to me.\" Most clients are relieved; supplying fixes is work they did not want.\n\n## Show the brief with the work\n\nAttach one sentence when you present: *the one thing this has to do is X, for Y.* This changes the question the reviewer is answering from \"do I like this\" to \"does this do X\", which is a question they can actually answer well, and it makes irrelevant feedback visibly irrelevant without anyone needing to say so.\n\n## Feedback from other designers is a different instrument\n\nDesigners give you diagnosis, which is valuable, and they diagnose against craft standards rather than against your brief. A designer will tell you the spacing is inconsistent and will not tell you that nobody outside the trade understood the piece.\n\nUse both and do not confuse them. **Strangers tell you whether it works. Designers tell you why it does not.** A critique from a peer who has not read the brief is a critique of the craft alone, and craft is not what the piece was for.\n\n## The limitation, which cuts both ways\n\nThis framework can become a way of never being wrong. If every disagreement is reclassified as the client's inability to diagnose, you have built a machine for dismissing them, and you will be wrong sometimes in exactly the cases where it matters.\n\nTwo honest checks. First: clients often know things you do not: about their customers, their market, their history, the piece that failed three years ago for reasons nobody wrote down. When a client insists on something that seems wrong, the question to ask is what they know that you do not, and sometimes the answer is substantial.\n\nSecond: credibility is a finite budget. Spend it defending the things the message depends on, and concede the rest quickly and without sulking. A designer who fights over a typeface has nothing left when the client wants to add a fourth message to a poster, which is the fight that actually matters."},"check":{"question":"A client says \"make the phone number bigger\" and the designer instead deletes two competing elements, leaving the number the same size. Why can this be the correct response?","options":[{"text":"Clients rarely mean their suggestions literally, so a designer should generally treat stated changes as approximate.","correct":false,"tempting":"Generalises into a licence to reinterpret anything, which is how designers stop hearing clients at all."},{"text":"Smaller elements are cheaper to remove than to enlarge, so the fix that touches least of the layout is preferred.","correct":false,"tempting":"Invents an economy of effort; the choice is about what makes the number noticeable, not about which edit is quicker."},{"text":"The reliable part of the feedback was that the number went unnoticed, and noticing depends on what surrounds it as much as on its size.","correct":true},{"text":"Enlarging any one element disrupts the type scale, and maintaining a consistent scale across the whole system takes priority over accommodating an individual client request.","correct":false,"tempting":"Elevates a system rule above the problem being reported, which would justify ignoring the observation rather than solving it."}]},"prev":{"slug":"showing-work-to-strangers","title":"Three tests, no budget, twenty minutes","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/showing-work-to-strangers"},"next":{"slug":"defending-a-decision","title":"Argue from the document, not from taste","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/defending-a-decision"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) '\"Make the logo bigger\" is a symptom, not an instruction', in Making It Say Something. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/taking-feedback-without-drowning (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"“Make the logo bigger” is a symptom, not an instruction","courseTitle":"Making It Say Something","module":{"index":8,"slug":"judgement-and-the-body-of-work","title":"Judgement, and the work that accumulates"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"People are reliable about what they noticed and unreliable about why, so never argue with an observation and never simply execute a prescription: ask what they were doing when they noticed it, batch the feedback, and spend your credibility only on what the message depends on.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"left":{"title":"The prescription","items":["Make the logo bigger","Make the phone number red","It needs more energy","Can we try a different font"]},"type":"compare","right":{"title":"The observation","items":["I could not tell whose this was","I did not see the phone number","Nothing pulled my eye first","Something looks wrong and I cannot say what"]},"title":"What they said, and what is underneath it","caption":"Prescription is the only vocabulary most people have. Never argue with an observation, and never simply execute a prescription, because the fix is often to delete something else."},"alt":"Figure: What they said, and what is underneath it. The prescription: Make the logo bigger; Make the phone number red; It needs more energy; Can we try a different font. The observation: I could not tell whose this was; I did not see the phone number; Nothing pulled my eye first; Something looks wrong and I cannot say what. Prescription is the only vocabulary most people have. Never argue with an observation, and never simply execute a prescription, because the fix is often to delete something else."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"three-different-things-arrive-wearing-the-same-clothes","runs":[{"text":"Three different things arrive wearing the same clothes"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"When somebody responds to your work, what they say is one of three things, and telling them apart is most of the skill."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Observation","b":true},{"text":": what they noticed or failed to notice. “I didn’t see the phone number.”"}],[{"text":"Diagnosis","b":true},{"text":": their theory about why. “The phone number is too small.”"}],[{"text":"Prescription","b":true},{"text":": their proposed fix. “Make the phone number red.”"}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Non-designers are "},{"text":"excellent at observation","b":true},{"text":" and unreliable at diagnosis and prescription. They are not being presumptuous by supplying all three; prescription is the only vocabulary they have. “Make it bigger” is what “I did not notice it” sounds like when you do not have the words "},{"text":"hierarchy","i":true},{"text":" or "},{"text":"contrast","i":true},{"text":"."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The rule follows directly: "},{"text":"never argue with an observation, and never simply execute a prescription.","b":true}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"If they did not see the phone number, they did not see it. That is data and it is not negotiable. Whether the fix is size, weight, position, colour or removing the three things competing with it, is yours to determine, and the actual answer is frequently to delete something else rather than to enlarge the number."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-one-question-that-does-the-work","runs":[{"text":"The one question that does the work"}]},{"t":"quote","runs":[{"text":"”What were you doing, or looking for, when you noticed that?”","b":true}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This reliably converts a prescription back into the observation underneath it. “Make the logo bigger” becomes one of several quite different problems:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"“I could not tell at a glance whose this was”: a brand-presence problem, possibly solved by colour or position rather than size."}],[{"text":"“My board will ask why the logo is small”: a political problem, and honesty about that changes the conversation entirely."}],[{"text":"“It feels unbalanced there”: a composition problem that has nothing to do with the logo."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Each needs a different fix. Enlarging the logo solves the second one and damages the design for the other two."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"feedback-needs-a-shape-or-it-eats-the-project","runs":[{"text":"Feedback needs a shape, or it eats the project"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A trickle of comments across a week is how a design dies by accumulation: each change is reasonable, no one is watching the whole, and the result is a committee artefact nobody chose."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"What works:"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Batch it.","b":true},{"text":" One round, all comments together, from everybody, by a stated date."}],[{"text":"Name who decides.","b":true},{"text":" Not who comments: who decides, when two people want opposite things. Establish this at the brief, because discovering it during round three is how projects stall."}],[{"text":"Set a round count.","b":true},{"text":" “Two rounds of revisions included” is a normal professional term and it protects both sides."}],[{"text":"Ask for problems, not solutions.","b":true},{"text":" Say it explicitly when you send the work: “tell me what does not work or what you did not notice, and leave the fixes to me.” Most clients are relieved; supplying fixes is work they did not want."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"show-the-brief-with-the-work","runs":[{"text":"Show the brief with the work"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Attach one sentence when you present: "},{"text":"the one thing this has to do is X, for Y.","i":true},{"text":" This changes the question the reviewer is answering from “do I like this” to “does this do X”, which is a question they can actually answer well, and it makes irrelevant feedback visibly irrelevant without anyone needing to say so."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"feedback-from-other-designers-is-a-different-instrument","runs":[{"text":"Feedback from other designers is a different instrument"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Designers give you diagnosis, which is valuable, and they diagnose against craft standards rather than against your brief. A designer will tell you the spacing is inconsistent and will not tell you that nobody outside the trade understood the piece."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Use both and do not confuse them. "},{"text":"Strangers tell you whether it works. Designers tell you why it does not.","b":true},{"text":" A critique from a peer who has not read the brief is a critique of the craft alone, and craft is not what the piece was for."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-limitation-which-cuts-both-ways","runs":[{"text":"The limitation, which cuts both ways"}],"role":"limit"},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This framework can become a way of never being wrong. If every disagreement is reclassified as the client’s inability to diagnose, you have built a machine for dismissing them, and you will be wrong sometimes in exactly the cases where it matters."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Two honest checks. First: clients often know things you do not: about their customers, their market, their history, the piece that failed three years ago for reasons nobody wrote down. When a client insists on something that seems wrong, the question to ask is what they know that you do not, and sometimes the answer is substantial."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Second: credibility is a finite budget. Spend it defending the things the message depends on, and concede the rest quickly and without sulking. A designer who fights over a typeface has nothing left when the client wants to add a fourth message to a poster, which is the fight that actually matters."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"A client says “make the phone number bigger” and the designer instead deletes two competing elements, leaving the number the same size. Why can this be the correct response?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"Clients rarely mean their suggestions literally, so a designer should generally treat stated changes as approximate."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Generalises into a licence to reinterpret anything, which is how designers stop hearing clients at all."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Smaller elements are cheaper to remove than to enlarge, so the fix that touches least of the layout is preferred."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Invents an economy of effort; the choice is about what makes the number noticeable, not about which edit is quicker."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The reliable part of the feedback was that the number went unnoticed, and noticing depends on what surrounds it as much as on its size."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null},{"text":[{"text":"Enlarging any one element disrupts the type scale, and maintaining a consistent scale across the whole system takes priority over accommodating an individual client request."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Elevates a system rule above the problem being reported, which would justify ignoring the observation rather than solving it."}]}],"order":[0,3,2,1],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"showing-work-to-strangers","title":"Three tests, no budget, twenty minutes","minutes":9},"next":{"slug":"defending-a-decision","title":"Argue from the document, not from taste","minutes":8}}}