“Be good, but know what good is”

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:

I constantly find that my clients are leading us down rabbit holes of bad design. It takes the joy out of a project at times, and I often feel that we’re then left with an outcome that – in my opinion – doesn’t look good. How do I steer them to make good decisions in the refinement stage? How to make good design outcomes for clients with bad taste?

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

My uncle once gave me a brilliant piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten - “be good, but know what good is”. That’s what instantly springs to mind when I read your question.

Lots of your struggles seem to be linked to not having a shared understanding of ‘what good is’ with your clients. You mention the notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ a lot – and I think we can all agree that good for one person, is bad for another. I hate liquorice, my mum loves it – neither of us are making ‘bad’ decisions there – we just like different things.

I’d encourage you to set some criteria, in collaboration with your client that can lead you away from subjectivity – to be able to decide ‘what good is’ and maybe more importantly what good isn’t.

‘Good’ for a club flyer might be making something that consciously looks messy, or unaligned, or unusual. ‘Good’ for a hardback book about minimalist architecture might be about clean columns of text, well spaced images and a considerate typeface. See what I mean?

Forget good and bad – get interested and curious about defining ‘what good is’ before you start.

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.

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