Rock solid blog post from the good folks over at Mule Design Studio. We've all been on the client side of sorts when it comes to design, even it's just painting something in your house. And if you're in the design business, you've no doubt experienced much of this manner of feedback, good and bad and understand the cause and effects laid out here.

Enjoy.

Giving Better Design Feedback
View original post here 
by Mike Monteiro, Mule Design Studio

In previous posts we’ve gone over how to buy design and how to sell design. Let’s take a look at how to give good feedback.

For our purposes, it’s worth noting the difference between a critique (which happens between peers or from more senior professionals, such as art directors), and feedback (which comes from clients). In other words, feedback comes from people paying a designer to solve business problems—people who may not be suitably impressed that you implemented a 16 column grid across a golden mean. (I’ll be impressed FOR them.)

How Did We Get Here?

Let’s assume the presentation went well. The design team put in a solid performance, cleaned up after themselves, and shook your hand with the appropriate amount of pressure on the way out. Hopefully someone took notes and offered to make them available to you. Those will be helpful. You should have also reached an agreement with someone in a project manager capacity about when your feedback is due.

Some design studios will also offer guidelines for giving feedback, and if they don’t they should. It’s a good client services tool.

In the aftermath, you are alone, alone with a stack of work that will affect the health of your organization, and your design team is returning to their office, with a stop at the nearest Fluevog store.

What’s in Play?

Whether or not you’ve received detailed guidelines, make sure you’re clear on which elements you’re supposed to be evaluating. Are we looking at the overall brand, the page structure, or typography? Are they comping with actual content, including photo assets, or did they take the easy way out and fill the comp with ersatz Latin and Flickr photos? (Guilty: I sometimes comp with ersatz Latin.)

It’s Not Art

First rule of design feedback: what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at objectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, “Do I like it?” but “Does this meet our goals?” If it’s blue, don’t ask yourself whether you like blue. Ask yourself if blue is going to help you sell sprockets. Better yet: ask your design team. You just wrote your first feedback question.

I Don’t Know Anything About Design

Who cares? Your customers probably don’t know anything about design either, and the project’s ultimate success rides on how they respond to it.

Let the design team be the design experts. Your job is to be the business expert. Ask them how their design solutions meet your business goals. If you trust your design team, and they can explain how their recommendations map to those goals, you’re fine. If you neither trust them, nor can they defend their choices it’s time to get a new design team.

Screw Feelings

I’ve had several wonderful clients who raved about the work for the duration of the project only to get to a point far along into implementation and decide the design was all wrong. God bless them. They were trying to spare my feelings. Sadly, they ended up tanking their budget and having to redo a lot of work, which meant missing their deadline as well.

Good feedback is not synonymous with positive feedback. If something isn’t working for you, tell the design team as early as possible. Will they be hurt? Not if they are professionals. A good designer will argue for their solution, and then will know when to let go. (NB: The time to let go is when it becomes clear that the solution isn’t sufficiently effective, not as soon a client expresses a negative personal opinion about it.)

By all means, be respectful, but don’t hold back in order to spare an individual’s feelings. Taking criticism is part of the job description. The sooner they know, the sooner they can explore other paths.

SIDENOTE:

Run like hell from anyone calling themselves a “creative.” Design is a profession and a craft with standards and practices. It’s not a mystical undertaking, and designers are not magical beings.

Be Direct With Your Feedback

There’s only one way to take “This work sucks.” There are many ways to take “I’m not sure this is doing it for me.” And while the former may not be good feedback, per se, it certainly leaves no question that there’s a problem that needs addressing. Perhaps you can find a less blunt way to get your displeasure across, but leave it nice and clear. Personally, I’d rather have the clarity and I can deal with the bluntness, but I’ve been told I’m an asshole.

Lead With The General

Start with your summary evaluation. “Overall, this is going in the right direction.” “Overall this sucks.” etc. Explain why, and then go into detail. The “why” is the most important piece of all.

Good vs Bad

Good feedback relates back to goals and user needs. Bad feedback is subjective and prescriptive.

For example “There’s way too much going on here and the “Add to Cart” button gets lost.” That’s excellent feedback. Relates to the goal of the page, which is to apparently sell something, and communicates a problem to be solved, which is to get rid of all the junk on the page.

Avoid personal preferences: “I hate green.” There is absolutely nothing I can do with that statement other than feel sorry for you because there are some very nice green things in the world. Like money—which you’re now wasting by giving me bad feedback.

Prescriptive feedback comes along the lines of “Move the buttons over here.” And, of course, everyone’s favorite: “Make the logo bigger!” These may, in fact, be excellent ideas, but if we talked about the problems you’re trying to solve with these prescriptive solutions we might come up with better solutions or possibly uncover a bigger problem in the overall design system.

It’s like walking into your doctors office and demanding a prescription for penicillin. Could be that’s actually what you need, but there’s no way you’re walking out of that office without the pants coming down.

And of course the worst kind of feedback…

Don’t Try This At Home

There is nothing less helpful than getting feedback in the form of a comp (whether committed in Photoshop, Powerpoint, or Word). Nothing. I mean it. We’ve been in business at Mule for almost 10 years now and this is the only thing we’ve ever fired a client over. (It happened once. The client refused to stop after being told on numerous occasions that it was counter-productive, not to mention a contract violation.)

If something isn’t working for you, point it out and go into as much detail as possible as to why it’s not working. Tie it to the goals we agreed to earlier in the project. Understanding your reasoning is critical to solving the problem. Being told to just do something a certain way, or worse, getting a comp of it done that way only means we have to reverse-engineer the whole thing and find out what you were trying to solve. Lost time. Lost budget.

Ask Questions

Not sure about something? Ask. Don’t wait until the feedback is due. Pick up the phone and ask your design team for further clarification to write your feedback.

Distill Your Feedback

“John in marketing wants to be able to log in directly on the home page, but Tim in Engineering would prefer it on its own page. Can we compromise?”

No. We cannot compromise.

If you tell your barber that you like it short, but your significant other likes it long, you’re gonna get a mullet.

Listen to your team’s feedback, weigh the plusses and minuses, and then compile a clearly written feedback document full of strong decisions. There is no way to design a solution to an internal debate. Nor should that debate be passed along for your customers to suffer through. If members of your team have varying ideas on something, iron it out. Invite your design team to join in the debate. They should be eager to as it informs their work. But reconciling feedback is important to moving the process along successfully. Again; having to sort through 10 pages of internal disagreement means lost time and lost budget.

Present Your Feedback

Just as we don’t believe good design sells itself, we also don’t believe good feedback necessarily explains itself. Set up a time to go over your feedback with your design team, in person or on the phone. Walk through it together. Use the time to go over any sticking points, get clarity, and go over any issues that anyone on your team disagrees on. Bring that person on the call as well. The goal of this meeting is to make decisions and move forward.

Solid decisions, well-communicated and well-executed are the path to success. And of course we can all agree on one thing: the logo, she is always too small.

Or so he says.

Along with Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy has been one of the most quoted, respected, imitated, and studied ad men of all time. His legendary writing style was a hallmark of mid-century marketing and created a legion of followers who built their careers around his 'rules' and suggestions. (as well as a few televisions shows, such as Mad Men)

Following is an interesting letter written from Ogilvy to Ray Calt in 1955 as an answer to his question about his personal copywriting process. Not surprisingly, his self-deprecating style underplays the finished product, which often ended up on the tops of all ad award lists.

Letter courtesy of The Unpublished David Ogilvy: A Selection of His Writings from the Files of His Partners

April 19, 1955

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home. 

2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years. 

3. I am helpless without research material—and the more "motivational" the better. 

4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client. 

5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform. 

6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines. 

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts. 

9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy. 

10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.

11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)

12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose. 

Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility. 

Yours sincerely, 
D.O.

Yet another great post from Thinking Aloud, a thoughtful and interesting blog by Inaki Escudero. So good in face that we're not only linking to it, but we're straight-up copying it here. (Although obviously, we're giving him full-throttle credit.)

On personal branding ...

6 great questions to ask yourself. And you should be prepared to answer.

I interview a lot of creative professionals: Art directors, designers, copywriters, interactive designers, developers, planners and strategists, producers and I even get to talk to account people.

In most cases I don't follow the "resume-driven" script. I much rather look for non scripted answers. I look for the real drivers, the human needs not just needing a job.

I honestly love interviewing candidates, but most of the times I'm left with a dissapointed feeling. I think people for the most part don't prepare well for an interview.

This is more tragic when we think that in advertising, branding is the most important concept one must understand.

Personal branding, just like corporate branding is mostly about differentiation and to be substantially different is about knowing yourself.

I thought that I could help potential candidates by providing a list of questions, which answers could help you during the process of branding yourself:

• What value are you working on?
• What do you do to build, manage and maintain your network?
• If I Google you, what will I find?
• What is the last thing you created?
• What do you do to expose yourself to new ideas and new thinking on a regular basis?
• What keeps you awake at night? 
• What's your goal?

Your brand has a lot of competitors out there, make sure that your stand for something else than money, titles and ego driven awards.

For all of you 'classic' David Ogilvy-esque copywriters out there, you may be running into today's challenges of form vs. function. Here's a great article about how a balance of fluff and findability is shifting the power towards search and social.

Our favorite section of the article is this below. Click below to read the full article.

At first I was skeptical, borderline insulted. But when I saw how a slight tweak to my text would make my page views skyrocket, I became a convert. Now, instead of organizing my thoughts into pithy paragraphs for readers, I engineer my words so they’re algorithmically attractive. I rewrite my headlines to make them more enticing to Google. I tag them with dozens of relevant phrases to boost my authority on specific topics. I add search terms to my text to further optimize my SEO ranking. I admit that I don’t totally understand what that last sentence even means.

Here Are The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This:

1.    It has changed the way I write. If a bulleted listicle is proven to perform better than a well-crafted essay, I’m going to write the listicle.

2.   My headlines are noticeably less interesting than they used to be. But, as an editor once told me, clever headlines are dead, unless you’re The New York Post.

3.   After I publish a story, I spend an hour feeding it to social networks and aggregators when I should be writing the next piece. That doesn’t even count the hours spent composing the perfect social media haikus that serve as the lead-ins to my links. It’s reducing my per-word rate to pennies.

4.    I stay up at night worrying about how many people will tweet my as-yet-unpublished story. Add to that the endless perusing of other people’s Twitter streams to see what they’re reading and writing about and where my work can fit into the conversation.

5.    I wonder if I’m still a writer, or if I’m a content creator.

Read full article here: The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline, by Alissa Walker from Good Magazine.

It's not shocking to say this, but once again Bart Cleveland is right on point.

Ad Professionals Should Spend Less Time Remembering When
We Work in a Change Industry, so Start Acting Like It
By: Bart Cleveland Published: March 10, 2011

From AdAge.com. Original article and comments here.

Our industry is all about change. At least, we say we are. We say we believe in creating the next great wave of advertising. If that is so, we should take a look at the evidence.

Do we take risks and inspire?
Maybe not. There's a lot of the same ol', same ol' still being offered as fresh thinking. Perhaps because we are too afraid of losing what we have left to risk it all for something better. Regardless of whether it's from a lack of belief -- or apathy or laziness -- we are squandering a great opportunity to lead. If we believe we are the agents of change, we must change ourselves as well. Like Gen. George Patton, we need to attack without worrying about our flanks. We're moving forward too fast for the enemy to catch us. By the time they realize what we're up to, we're kicking them in the backside.

Are our recommendations relevant to our client's objectives?
A better question might be, do we know our client's business objectives? How deep are you delving into your client's world, both internally and externally? The more an agency understands the business goals of a client and the obstacles keeping them from success, the better marketing principles can be applied to removing obstacles and achieving those goals. You will also become much more important in the eyes of your clients, not to mention trustworthy.

Organize the toolbox. Get rid of the gimmicks.
Today the marketing landscape is more confusing for advertisers than ever. The toolbox is filled with new gadgets that are being misused. There's a lot of snake oil being peddled and we agencies should be showing the right way for our clients to go. That necessitates knowing the way.

Innovate integration.Perhaps a lack of conviction is why clients are showing less loyalty than ever. Integration is the new buzzword, but its implementation is a contradiction in most cases. My agency refers to it as the "jungle." A tangled mess of tactics that in most cases, work against one another to create a consistent brand story. Integration is an evolving method. There's room for innovation in how to use it to get the best results. Those that do so early are going to lead our industry for the foreseeable future.

A little over-the-horizon looking should come as second nature to an industry that prides itself on having the pulse of "what's next." Instead, we seem to cling to "remember when." Take a look at what you're offering your clients. Is it advertising? For your sake, I hope not.