The most dreaded situations, for me, were clients who would tear something apart, but offered no helpful reason why. "Jazz it up" was something repeated an alarming number of times in meetings. I can also remember someone saying that they wanted us to use more colors since they were paying for a full color ad. Because, you know, that's what cost all the money. The colors.
I'm not artistic, don't have that kind of creativity, and can't use words that would be helpful to you.
I can only tell you whether or not I like it and give a fumbling attempt to explain why.
This is why I (or my company) hired you: to do something that we can't.
It is incredibly hard to do the translation between designer language and client language. I've worked with some graphic designers who are absolutely amazing at taking my malformed mumblings and using them as effective critiques and requests. But not many people can do that and it leads to frustration on both sides.
This is why those who can do the translation can make incredible money and run their own firms. Just like how people in other industries (accounting, law, coding...) who can translate across domains make more money and run firms.
I'm asking this out of curiosity, not attacking you, since you said yourself you're not creative and rely on these people for their creative talents.
For instance, I can't cook much more than eggs and bacon, but I can sure tell whether a dish at a restaurant is any good. And I can even narrow down a dish's quality into various broad classes: disgusting, bland, okay, good, really good, and great. Most other aesthetic creations are similar.
You can no whether or not they work for you without knowing why. But the nature of subjectivity is you can't know whether they work in a more general sense without analyzing the elements of the thing in question against an accurate-enough picture of the distribution of tastes in the population.
Just because you like or dislike a particular creative piece doesn't mean that you have what it takes to dictate a piece of creative work that will be exposed to millions of people.
Is the image very busy? I may know that I'm going to want to use it along with other assets or in presentations - how is it going to affect that? How do the colors and shapes used compare to other assets it will be used beside, how will it work in different mediums? Bright yellow isn't great for projectors or for legibility.
One example - a global accounting firm introduced a new framework. They had a diagram that had core elements, supporting concepts, and overarching concerns. It would work fine at full size on a laptop but was very poor for display on a low res projector to an audience of 100. This design was core to the effort and would be used in very many situations with projectors to large audiences.
I may say that I want to look like James Bond skiing - you design me a yellow ski suit very similar to the intro of The Spy Who Loved Me. I'm horrified because I want a look similar to the all black look of Daniel Craig in Spectre. My inability to communicate about design created a problem but I can judge on whether or not you've achieved my goal.
Translation across domains is VERY HARD.
Definitely, and in my professional career I have never had my work thrown out in a way which made me feel bad. I have been ignored a few times only to be proved right a few weeks later though!
If he is only feeding his own ego by being an asshole, it's better to get away.
It can be hard to tell the difference, especially if you are young.
It was indeed a horrible place to work.
I wish this principle was adhered to across all industries where we (as individuals) get our 'work' reviewed. If you can't do your best and then be able to let go of it, it causes some serious pent-up anger and demotivation. I find myself slipping into 'brutalist feedback' mode (that I'm used to from creative work), before worrying about offending the recipient.
I'm not sure if this is coincidental, but anecdotally I found that my biggest shift in being able to let my creative work 'go' was after reading The Power of Now[0] and The Chimp Paradox[1], and practicing mindfulness. Fundamentally, I think it's an ego issue as to why it's so hard to take criticism. I'm certainly not saying ego-death is a prerequisite, but instead to learn how to short-circuit your anger away from feedback as a result of taking it too personally.
It is after all, not the work itself, but how it is received that you should be striving towards!
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Now [1] - https://chimpmanagement.com/the-chimp-paradox/
To instill creativity in my direct reports, I have to smack them in the face when they fail to demonstrate sufficient creativity.
I know it sounds harsh, but they're developing great callouses on their face which they would not have obtained had it not been for my unorthodox training.
A lot of people might think I should apologize, but ask them in my presence if they would rather work elsewhere!
During my short career as an in-house illustrator, it was perfectly acceptable for the art director to kick your ass and generally abuse you. You learned to develop a thick skin really quickly!
Pauses, steps back and says, “I think it can use one little change, may I?”
He then takes a white paint brush and proceeds to erase my entire drawing with it.
“Ah, much better”, he says.
He was a total asshole but had a cult like following. Those of us remaining by the end of the semester loved him. To this day I credit that class with dramatically improving my drawing skills, but it definitely wasn’t for everyone.
...harsh criticism can be hard to take, I often try (and fail) to inject some humor into the situation to take the edge off.
Even letting minor defects pass implicitly creates a culture where hey minor defects are okay.
But, that can often be what it takes.
I have had similar experiences. Once a person breaks through, the relationship changes.
What, I'm currently through this process with my Masters' dissertation. It's not exactly disheartening, but it's uncomfortable.
Bonus, the math-heavy (I'm in computational physics) 70-page documentclass-article thing has a couple of asides that are so, so wrong (1.5 years ago I didn't really understand a lot of things) and it's embarassing to have them pointed out.
But eh, I'm glad I'm going through this process. ---
I'm an amateur student of philosophy and often want to blog about certain ideas I think I'm beginning to have. But I'm not sure enough to put my name on them! I wish I could hire a professional philosopher (many of which will be underemployed anyway) to look over my stuff and tell me when they're embarassingly wrong rather than just out of the box.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/02/the_my...
When I started getting into the arts, I was introduced to the culture of "workshopping" pieces, i.e. have my work criticized. It was disorienting at first, but the honest feedback was very useful plus it helped me develop a thick skin. It helped me get better fast.
It can be drastically worse than this. When I was at architecture school in the 90's some tutors would actually compete to see if they could make students cry in presentations. Things like physically tearing up hand drawn plans in front of all the other students. I remember tutors going round the final year presentation at midnight and deciding the general standard wasn't good enough, phoning the people they thought needed to do more work, telling them they would fail and that they needed to get out of bed and work for another 24 hours. These were people that had been already been working super long hours for weeks to get their stuff done. Madness. It wasn't just my school that was like this either, it was much worse back then but there are still pockets of this culture in my industry. It is no wonder that back then architecture students in the UK had the highest rate of suicide.