“Establish some clear criteria for what makes the design you’re working on a success”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

Design is very subjective. When I’m working on a project, sometimes I don’t agree with the feedback I receive from the design head, but I end up altering the design to completely satisfy their vision only. I find myself lifelessly creating designs that I know they will approve of and I would have never created if it were up to me.

How do I stay motivated in the workplace, or is a job change the way forward?

Alex Bec, CEO of It’s Nice That, Creative Lives in Progress and If You Could Jobs:

I can feel the eyes of junior designers all over the world on this one…

I always believe in trying to work through challenging situations before making a change. You learn more that way and the grass isn’t always greener on the other side – so see if you can influence what’s happening in your current role first.

As for advice, I think this one is reasonably straight-forward. The key to making something more objective, and less subjective, is to establish some clear criteria for what makes the design you’re working on a success. Then let the criteria decide, not you or your design head…

An overly-simple example here to illustrate my point. You’re working on a logo for motorway signage that will be viewed at high speed. So, you might establish with your design head that the logo needs to be easily legible from a distance, and simple to recognise at speed. If your design head was to suggest using yellow type on a white background for the logo – you could agree that that isn’t highly legible and wouldn’t fit the criteria – leaving you the opportunity to design something with more contrast and hopefully have a solid case for the suggestion. Regardless of whether your creative director’s favourite colour is yellow, it should be clear what the correct path is.

Now I’m sure most of the conversations and negotiations you’re having are far more complex than my reductive example(!) – but the principle still remains. The only way to move from subjectivity to objectivity is to set some clear success metrics.

Try establishing those with the person giving you feedback first – and see where that takes you. If, after a good amount of time, effort and proactivity on your part you still aren’t getting anywhere, somewhere new might not be a bad idea…

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

If You Could is the jobs board from It’s Nice That, the place to find jobs in the creative industries.

Want to stay on top of your job search? Or keep an ear out for when your dream job arrives on our site? Click here to set up tailored job alerts arriving straight into your inbox so you never miss an opportunity. See below for the latest opportunities: