Here's a scenario most designers have lived through more than once. A client receives the first round of concepts and responds with something like: "I'm not feeling it," or "Can you make it pop more?" or — the classic — "My wife doesn't like it." The designer stares at the screen, takes a breath, and tries to figure out what that actually means.
This is one of the most common friction points in any creative project, and it almost always comes from the same place: business owners aren't trained to give design feedback. That's not a criticism — it's just the reality. Most people know what they like when they see it, but they haven't developed the language to explain why something isn't working, or what they'd need to see instead.
The good news is that giving better design feedback isn't about knowing design. It's about communicating clearly. And that's something any business owner can learn.
When a designer presents concepts, they're not asking "do you personally like this?" They're asking something more specific: does this design solve the problem we agreed it needed to solve?
Before you respond to anything, go back to the brief. What was the goal of this piece? Who is the audience? What feeling or action was it supposed to produce? Use those answers as your filter. Feedback grounded in the project's objectives is almost always more useful than feedback grounded in personal preference.
The question to ask yourself isn't "do I like this?" It's "would the right person respond to this the way we want them to?" Those are very different questions, and the second one leads to far more productive conversations.
This is the most important shift you can make as a client. When you receive a design that doesn't feel right, your instinct is usually to prescribe a fix — "make it bigger," "change the color," "move the logo." But that puts you in the designer's chair without their training, and it often moves the work in the wrong direction.
Instead, describe what isn't working for you in terms of the problem or feeling, and let the designer solve it. Here's the difference in practice:
Less useful: "Make the headline bigger."More useful: "The headline doesn't feel like the most important thing on the page. I'm not sure where to look first."
Less useful: "Can you use a different color? Maybe blue?"More useful: "This doesn't feel trustworthy enough to me. It feels too casual for the audience we're trying to reach."
The first version tells the designer what to do. The second version tells them what the design needs to accomplish — and gives them the room to find the best way to get there. That's usually where the strongest work comes from.
Most people only speak up when something is wrong. But telling your designer what's working is just as important as telling them what isn't — and it's something clients almost never do.
When you respond to a concept without acknowledging the elements that are landing, the designer has to guess which parts to protect and which parts to change. A redesign that tries to fix everything often ends up losing the things that were actually right.
Something simple like "the color palette feels exactly right, but the typography feels too formal for our audience" is far more actionable than "I don't think this is quite there yet." It gives the designer a clear starting point: keep the palette, reconsider the type.
Words like "modern," "clean," "bold," "timeless," and "sophisticated" sound specific but almost never are. Every designer has a slightly different version of what those words look like visually — and so does every client. If the brief says "sophisticated," one person pictures Chanel and another pictures a local law firm.
References cut through that ambiguity completely. When you share a website, a competitor's logo, a packaging example, or even an Instagram account and say "this is the direction I'm thinking" — suddenly you and the designer are looking at the same thing. You don't have to explain what "premium" means when you can show it.
References also help you get clear on your own thinking. If you find yourself having trouble articulating what you want, start searching for examples. The act of looking for things that feel right will tell you more about your instincts than any amount of trying to describe them in writing.
This one matters more than it might seem. If multiple people in your organization are reviewing the work — a partner, a team member, a spouse — the feedback should be consolidated before it goes to the designer. Receiving twelve separate emails with twelve different opinions, some of them contradictory, is one of the most disruptive things that can happen to a creative project.
Decide internally who has final say, gather everyone's input, resolve the conflicts yourself, and send a single clear set of notes. That's not just courteous — it's what makes revisions efficient and keeps the project moving.
If you see something you don't understand or don't immediately like, ask before you judge. Designers make intentional decisions — about spacing, scale, color, weight, layout — and often those decisions have a strategic reason behind them that isn't obvious at first glance.
Try: "Can you walk me through why you made this choice?" or "What were you trying to communicate here?" You might change your mind when you understand the thinking. And if you still disagree after hearing it, your feedback will be more grounded because you know what you're actually pushing back on.
A few phrases that, with the best intentions, make a designer's job much harder:
"I'll know it when I see it." This means there's no clear brief, and the project will run in circles until one appears. Before the next round, define what success actually looks like.
"My [friend / spouse / team member] doesn't like it." Design decisions should be grounded in your audience and your business goals — not in the taste of people who aren't part of the brief.
"Can you just make it pop?" This communicates that something is missing but gives no direction on what. Try to name the specific quality that's absent — energy, weight, clarity, warmth — and work from there.
"I kind of want something completely different." This one is fine to say — but only if something has fundamentally shifted in the project's direction. If you're saying it after the second round of a logo that's heading in the right direction, it's worth asking whether the issue is the design or the brief.
Good design feedback is a skill, and it gets easier with practice. The goal isn't for you to become a designer — it's for you to become a better collaborator. The more clearly you can articulate what you need and why, the better the work will be. And the better the work, the less back-and-forth it takes to get there.
Your designer wants the project to be great just as much as you do. Give them the right information, and they'll have everything they need to get it there.
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