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So you’ve hired a designer or design firm to create a new logo for your company, told them all about what you’re looking for and what you want to communicate visually and they have just given you a handful of design concepts back. Now what?

Many people’s first impulse is to share, share, share. But it’s not the best idea, especially not when you’re just looking at first concepts. Usually a designer will give you several ideas; we deliver 3 or 5 in a logo design project. The first thing you need to do is eliminate the concepts that you are completely uninterested in. Hopefully this narrows you to no more than 2 concepts. Then, if you MUST share, choose 1 or 2 trusted advisers or colleagues. But make sure that they know your business almost as well as you do and that they understand what you were going for with the design. Never show people graphic design “cold.” You’re likely to get the harshest and least constructive criticism in that scenario and it will confuse and frustrate you and may ultimately impact the design in a negative way.

The best time to show people a design concept is when it’s almost done; when you’re 99% happy and just need some validation to seal the deal. But there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Don’t present it and ask an open-ended question like “What do you think?”

Most people aren’t used to reviewing graphic design concepts on a daily basis and so this will be quite an occasion. And when somebody invites you to critique something, a little switch goes off in our brains that tells us to find something wrong with it and that if we don’t say something critical, we’re not doing our jobs. You’ll hear everything from “it looks like _________” to “I just don’t like the color blue” to “We should add another big icon at the front.” If your concept is clean and modern, someone will tell you it looks retro. If you’ve done something traditional, someone will tell you it looks too contemporary. This feedback will get you nowhere.

So, when you do share, don’t present open-ended invitation for critique. Say something like “We’ve been working on a new logo and we think we’re going to go with this one,” or “Hey, look at our new logo.” If people think the decision is already made, it takes the pressure off them to say something harsh. They’re much more likely to tell you what they really think and you’re actually likely to get compliments! And if someone really and truly doesn’t like your logo design, they’ll still tell you and probably give you a more valuable critique of why then they would have with an open-ended question.

Other tips:

• Don’t show your whole office looking for comments, you’ll get way too much feedback for any of it to be potentially valuable.
• Try to show only one person at a time. If you get a group together, you’ll start to get a “leader and follower” group dynamic where one or two people give opinions and everyone else just nods their heads.
• Friends and family will almost always hate your design ideas and will be the most critical. Don’t know why, but it’s true. Be suspicious if they actually like what you’re showing them. But if they rip you to shreds, run with the design… It’s gold.
• You’re the boss and don’t forget it. It’s YOUR company and YOUR vision… So don’t ever let other people derail your ideas if you believe in them.

And one last tip… “I don’t like it” is not good criticism. It doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help your designer. So if all someone can muster is “I don’t like it” without a good reason or rationale, throw that comment out immediately and focus more on the feedback that has some real content.

Posted by E. Wolf