Designing for Someone Who Isn’t You

On designing beyond your own taste, knowing when to trust your instincts, when to listen, and when to leave the pink alone.

A few years ago I worked on a stationery range that was pink, floral, covered in bees and butterflies and, quite frankly, not my thing. There was nothing wrong with it. I was proud of the work and I knew I had done a good job, but I remember looking at it and thinking, good god, who is buying this?

Turns out, quite a lot of people…

It sold incredibly well and I was genuinely surprised. I think I had assumed that because I wasn't particularly excited by it, other people wouldn't be either, which seems ridiculous when I say it now because of course people like different things. I think it is quite easy as a designer though to forget how much your own taste is sitting there in the background influencing the way you judge your work. You spend so much time developing an eye, looking at other people's work, learning the rules, figuring out what you respond to and eventually becoming quite confident in saying when you think something is working. Somewhere amongst all of that it can become difficult to tell the difference between your professional judgement and the fact that you simply don't like butterflies.

That was probably one of the first times I really started thinking about what my personal taste had to do with whether something was actually well designed. I have a pretty strong idea of what I like. I love minimalism, simple layouts, good typography, mid-century design and a lot of black. Then somewhere on the other side of that I love neo-Gothic design, which strangely feels perfectly at home next to all that simplicity. I have colours I love, typefaces I can't stand and trends I get completely sucked into just like everyone else. I would love to say that being a designer has somehow given me impeccable taste and made me immune to whatever colour the internet has collectively decided is beautiful this month, but it hasn't.

Of course all of that feeds into my work, and I don't think I would want to remove it completely even if I could. You can't spend years looking at design, art, fashion, interiors, packaging, books, photography and everything else around you without developing a particular eye. Your references build up over time and become part of how you make decisions, sometimes without you even realising you're doing it. That instinct is incredibly useful. The problem comes when you forget to question where it is coming from.

Working as a commercial designer has been particularly good at teaching me that, mostly because eventually the customer will humble you. I've made things I was convinced would sell that didn't, and I've made things I would never personally buy that sold out. I remember when red and baby blue were suddenly everywhere and I was sure our customer would love them too. They were moving through fashion and interiors, I loved the combination, it felt fresh and there was enough evidence around me that I could make a pretty convincing case for why it was worth exploring.

As it turned out, she still wanted pink and purple, and perhaps some more pink to go with the pink she already had. Message received.

That one really stuck with me because it made me realise how much of the customer I had filled in myself. I hadn't necessarily misunderstood the trend, I had misunderstood how relevant it was to her. Now when something performs differently from how I expected, I want to pull it apart a little and understand what happened. I look at the sales, the colours, the format, the price, what it was sitting beside and what else was happening in the market. Sometimes we pushed something further than the customer was ready to go, sometimes we backed a trend that simply wasn't right for her, and sometimes there isn't one satisfying answer because people are complicated and buying things is complicated.

It has also stopped me from thinking of sales data as a set of instructions. If pink performs well, obviously that tells me something useful, but the answer can't always be to make the same pink thing again until everyone is sick of looking at it. At some point you have to ask what people actually responded to. Maybe you try a new shape in a colour you already know she loves, or take a familiar format somewhere slightly different visually and see what happens. You are still listening to the customer, but you are also giving her the opportunity to surprise you.

I think all of this eventually leads to a bigger and slightly annoying question, which is how you decide whether something is actually good when personal taste is taken out of it.

I don't think anybody gets to decide what good taste is. It depends on the person looking at something, what they have grown up around and what they personally find beautiful. Designers can be particularly bad at forgetting this because we spend so much time surrounded by other designers, looking at design publications, awards and beautifully art-directed portfolios, that sometimes a particular kind of design-world taste starts feeling objective when it really isn't.

There are, however, principles underneath design that have very little to do with whether I personally want something in my house. Hierarchy matters. Legibility matters. Contrast, proportion, spacing and the way information is organised matter because somebody has to actually understand the thing in front of them. Our eyes look for patterns and structure. You can play with those rules, break them and stretch them as far as you like, but I think you need to understand what they were doing for you before you decide to get rid of them.

For me, good design usually comes back to fairly ordinary questions. Can I read it? Do I understand it? Does the hierarchy make sense? Does the concept communicate what it is supposed to communicate? Can the person using it find what they need without having to work unnecessarily hard? Sometimes genuinely good design is quite boring from a designer's perspective. It might never make it onto a mood board or win an award, but it quietly does its job incredibly well.

You shouldn't have to answer riddle number three to understand a piece of design.

I think sometimes designers can become so determined to keep something visually interesting that we forget somebody eventually has to use it. You can make the type tiny because it looks elegant or turn a very straightforward piece of information into a clever visual system because it looks fantastic when you explain it across six slides in a case study. The problem comes when the person using it doesn't have those six slides. They just have the thing.

Good design should feel good, not just look good. Looking good is obviously part of it, and I am a graphic designer so I am certainly not going to pretend I don't care deeply about that. Feeling good includes everything around the visual experience though. It is opening something and immediately understanding it. It is being able to read the type without thinking about the type. It is using something every day without one tiny annoying detail slowly driving you insane. When those things are done really well, you often don't notice them at all.

I appreciate that much more now than I did when I was at university. I was obsessed with the huge polished Behance projects, immaculate mock-ups, unusual die cuts, foils, spot UV and complicated packaging systems. I would look at them and wonder why everything couldn't be made like that.

Then you start making things commercially and suddenly you understand exactly why everything cannot be made like that.

That multi-angle die-cut notepad with spot UV, foil and neon inks might look incredible in a mock-up, but somebody actually has to make the bloody thing. Somebody has to cost it. There is a minimum order quantity. There are tooling costs. The material you wanted might not be available at the quantity you need. Then somebody has to pack it, ship it, display it and eventually sell it at a price a real person is willing to pay. Suddenly the adorable $12 notepad you designed costs roughly a billion dollars to manufacture and we have a problem.

Once you understand production and all the less glamorous parts of bringing something into the world, your idea of good design changes quite a lot. It also makes you much more careful about criticising finished work when you know absolutely nothing about how it got there. It is incredibly easy to walk into a shop, pick something up and say, why the hell did they design it like this? Designers love doing this. Give us five minutes in a shop and apparently we're all creative directors with complete knowledge of the business.

Except we don't know the construction they originally wanted. We don't know the material they couldn't afford, the supplier limitation, the minimum order quantity, the testing that failed or the retail price they needed to reach. Maybe the thing you are holding is option seventeen. Maybe everyone involved knows perfectly well that option three was prettier and option three also added six dollars to the cost.

That doesn't mean every strange design decision has a secret brilliant explanation behind it. Sometimes things are just badly designed. Experience has made me much more curious about why something ended up the way it did before deciding that I know exactly how I would have done it better. There is so much invisible work inside a finished object, and the final thing rarely tells you the entire story.

It is also why I am wary of using finished design as the foundation for another project. Of course I look at other designers' work and save references, but I try not to look at the end result and start designing backwards from it because I have no idea what journey produced that outcome. If I copy the answer without understanding the problem, I have nowhere to go when my own project inevitably changes. The budget moves, the size changes, somebody needs another piece of information added or the supplier tells you the thing you have lovingly designed for two weeks is physically impossible. That is when you need to understand why you made your decisions in the first place.

I think having a very strong personal style can become complicated for a commercial designer for the same reason. I love seeing somebody's eye running through their portfolio. There is something wonderful about developing a visual language that feels recognisably yours, particularly if you are an independent designer or artist. I have my own creative work where I absolutely want it to feel like it came out of my strange little brain. That is part of the point.

Commercial design asks something slightly different of you. Sometimes you see a portfolio where every project has somehow arrived at the same typeface, colour palette, photography and personality. It can be beautifully executed, but after a while I start wondering what happens when the next brief doesn't want any of those things. I need to bring my eye to the brands I work for because that is part of why I was hired, but there is already a customer, a history, a price point and a creative direction there. My job is to contribute something to that world rather than repeatedly trying to turn it into mine.

This isn't the Emily show.

Working out what someone else wants is still murky because there isn't a foolproof process where you do enough research and the perfect answer eventually appears. We look at sales data, trends, customer feedback, competitors and what is happening across the wider market. We ask questions when we have the opportunity to, then experience and instinct start filling in the gaps. Eventually a room full of people has to look at an idea and decide whether we have a good enough feeling about it to make thousands of them.

I trust that feeling much more now because there is more information sitting underneath it. I have seen things sell and things flop, watched trends move through the market and seen which ones our customer follows and which ones she completely ignores. I have also worked with creative directors whose instincts I trust immensely, and being around people like that teaches you how somebody can be trend focused without simply chasing trends.

Sometimes everyone in the room gets excited about an idea and you simply have to try it. There has to be room for that because if every decision is made entirely from historical sales data, you eventually design yourself into a corner. Creative courage can be quite small too. Maybe you introduce a new shape in a colour you know the customer already loves. If that works, perhaps next time you push somewhere else. Sometimes they come with you and sometimes they don't, and both responses tell you something.

My service design study made me think about this much more broadly because it encouraged me to stop looking at the product as an isolated beautiful object and start thinking about the life happening around it. What is the person carrying? Where is this going to sit? Is it going to make something easier for them? How does it fit beside the things they already own? Even before they buy it, how does it sit in store alongside everything else?

I realised I had already been thinking about many of these things through commercial design, but studying service design gave me a much better language for them. It also made empathy in design feel much more practical to me. Sometimes empathy gets talked about as though we are going to stare deeply into the soul of our customer and understand every hope and fear she has ever had. I make stationery. Nobody needs me to do that. I do need to understand enough of her life to make something that fits into it properly.

For me that includes affordability, usability and quality. If someone is buying a dated product and expecting to use it for twelve months, I want it to survive twelve months. I want the pages to work, the binding to hold up and the materials to feel appropriate for what somebody has paid. If there is an opportunity to use recycled materials or make a more sustainable choice, I want us to explore it. If a beautiful design choice makes something incredibly annoying to use every day, I want to question whether we need it.

I think this is where understanding who you're designing for becomes a little more complicated than simply listening to what they say they want. You are trying to see the product from their point of view, but you are also bringing knowledge to the process that they might not have. You know what certain materials will do, what a construction might cost, what happens when something goes into production and where a seemingly small decision might create a much bigger problem later. Sometimes the most useful thing you can bring to a project is actually a bit of resistance.

Designing for somebody else doesn't mean blindly giving them everything they ask for. Sometimes caring about the customer means pushing back. There are decisions that might make a product harder to use, poorer quality, unnecessarily expensive or impossible to manufacture properly. Part of becoming more experienced is learning when to put your hand up and say, I don't think this is going to work, and then being able to explain exactly why.

That ability to explain why is probably one of the biggest things I have learned, because “I don't like it” gives you almost nothing to work with. Why don't you like it? Is it the colour? Is the hierarchy wrong? Is something difficult to read? Does it feel too young, too serious or too busy? Is there an actual problem here or is it simply something you wouldn't choose for yourself? Once you can explain that feeling, you have somewhere to go with it.

I definitely wasn't always good at receiving that kind of feedback either. Earlier in my career I would get really upset when I felt like I hadn't nailed something, and I am still incredibly critical of my own work. There is absolutely a tiny part of my brain that occasionally decides one unsuccessful concept means I am the worst designer who has ever lived and should probably never open Illustrator again. Thankfully that feeling passes. You look at the feedback, you look at what happened and you try something else. There still needs to be pride in the work, but every single thing doesn't need to be a personal creative triumph.

There is actually a strange kind of freedom in that. Once everything stops needing to represent your personal taste, you get to play in places you might never have gone on your own. I wear an enormous amount of black and somehow spend a good portion of my working life thinking very seriously about pink. I get to use colours I wouldn't naturally choose, work within visual languages completely different from my own and understand why somebody else finds joy in something that does very little for me personally. Your own taste stops being the boundary of what you are capable of making.

I think the longer I do this, the more useful curiosity becomes. Before deciding a customer has terrible taste, I want to understand what she likes about something. Before deciding another designer made a ridiculous choice, I want to remember that I have no idea what constraints they were working with. Before dismissing feedback because I disagree with it, I want to know what is actually sitting underneath it. Sometimes there is a design problem there, sometimes there is a constraint I hadn't considered and sometimes I realise I need to push back.

And sometimes, after pulling the entire thing apart, there isn't actually anything wrong with it at all. You just don't like pink.

Great. Leave the pink alone.

There will always be some of yourself in the things you design, and I think there should be. Your eye, experience, curiosity and judgement are part of what you bring to the work. Over time, I think you become better at recognising which parts of yourself are useful to the project and which parts need to sit quietly in the corner for a while.

I can make something pink. I can cover it in flowers and butterflies. I can spend weeks making sure every tiny part of it is considered, useful and beautifully resolved. I can be proud when somebody picks it up, loves it and decides it deserves a place in their life.

I still don't have to buy one.