“Make the logo bigger” is a symptom, not an instruction

Three different things arrive wearing the same clothes

When somebody responds to your work, what they say is one of three things, and telling them apart is most of the skill.

• Observation: what they noticed or failed to notice. “I didn’t see the phone number.”
• Diagnosis: their theory about why. “The phone number is too small.”
• Prescription: their proposed fix. “Make the phone number red.”

Non-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.

The rule follows directly: never argue with an observation, and never simply execute a prescription.

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.

The one question that does the work

”What were you doing, or looking for, when you noticed that?”

This reliably converts a prescription back into the observation underneath it. “Make the logo bigger” becomes one of several quite different problems:

• “I could not tell at a glance whose this was”: a brand-presence problem, possibly solved by colour or position rather than size.
• “My board will ask why the logo is small”: a political problem, and honesty about that changes the conversation entirely.
• “It feels unbalanced there”: a composition problem that has nothing to do with the logo.

Each needs a different fix. Enlarging the logo solves the second one and damages the design for the other two.

Feedback needs a shape, or it eats the project

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.

What works:

1. Batch it. One round, all comments together, from everybody, by a stated date.
2. 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.
3. Set a round count. “Two rounds of revisions included” is a normal professional term and it protects both sides.
4. 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.

Show the brief with the work

Attach 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.

Feedback from other designers is a different instrument

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.

Use 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.

The limitation, which cuts both ways

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.

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.

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.