Creating Room to Breathe

You move a project forward by incorporating feedback like "I'd like this part changed" or "I want this to stand out a bit more" into the design you've made. A first draft almost never goes out into the world as-is.

The more grounded and confident you are in your own proposal, the harder it becomes to take in other people's opinions. What kind of communication is needed at times like that?

Creating room in your mind

There are tricks to avoid triggering major rework, and they're introduced in all kinds of places.

• Get to roughly 80% complete as quickly as possible
• Share progress partway through to check you haven't drifted off course
• Carefully hear out the other party's requirements in advance

That's usually about it. All of these are certainly important, but even if you do all of the above, revisions will still happen without fail. Depending on how the work is organized, there may even be situations where you can't get detailed communication in along the way.

Also, everything listed above is a method that depends on the other party. Often they can't judge something until they see it visually, and sometimes they can only convey their image after the fact.

What you need at times like that is a mindset that assumes revisions are coming — room in your mind. Some people might feel "if it were that easy, no one would struggle," or "isn't that just about personality?" — but I do think there are a few tricks to creating that room.

Don't spend too much time on one spot

First, don't build in too much fine detail into the first draft. This is close to "get to roughly 80% complete as quickly as possible," but it's important to design in an order where you nail down the details last.

The person working on it keeps staring at that screen the whole time, but the client is seeing it for the first time when they review it. Convey things to the other party in order: big-picture direction → overall layout and flow → fine details.

The client feels the impression a design gives at a glance. If that impression is going to change, you first need to check whether the big-picture direction itself was off.

Nail down the points that shouldn't waver

From the position of the person requesting the design, there are individual points where they want things done a certain way, but they can't give instructions for every single visual detail. If they could, they'd just be able to design it themselves. Within any request, there's a mix of points they want you to nail down, and parts they want left to the designer's own interpretation.

Whether you can understand these "points they want nailed down" is a crucial part of the hearing process. When explaining the reasoning behind a design you've made, if you can also explain the interpretation behind how you translated it into the design, things go more smoothly.

Don't frame it as "accept or reject"

When reviewing a design, the person who made it can't help but feel pressure, as if it were their own presentation of results. But that presentation happens somewhere else — at launch.

Presenting a design and asking something like "so, what do you think?" makes it harder for both sides to give feedback, so avoid that approach. What matters is explaining the intent behind each point, and working together, facing the same direction, to consider whether anything is off and how to make it better.

You don't need to explain every last detail of the design — what's needed is conveying how you received and interpreted the request, and how you turned that into the design.

Building something that belongs to the client

This is specific to contracted projects, but I try never to forget that everything we produce belongs to the client. Ideas about how a design "should" be, or how it should be neatly put together, are of course important, but a deliverable only gains meaning once the client actually uses it.

I'm also careful about how I handle data that's already been delivered. Even if a change would make it better, I never touch anything beyond the part I was asked to work on without permission.

If you can look at things from one level up — asking why this design (or feature) is even needed — you can start to see your own design objectively too, and as a result, it should give you more room in your mind.

When revision requests pile up, it's easy to feel fed up, but if you think of it as being up to you what purpose it serves and what effect it produces, you can start to take the feedback you get from the other party proactively, as your own.

I think what matters is shifting perspective and always being able to look at things from a variety of angles.