Good feedback in graphic design directs attention to the right problem rather than the right answer. If someone tells you a design feels too cluttered, you don’t just remove half of the visual elements. The real problem is often that you lack strong enough hierarchy or your spacing is too tight. Perhaps your elements don’t align enough or your design has too many center-of-interest points. Being able to tell these things takes practice, but it will ultimately help you to strengthen your own visual judgment much more than if you simply followed or ignored every opinion that came your way.
It can also help to ask for feedback one thing at a time. If you show a mock up of a poster and only ask for feedback on the visual hierarchy before asking for feedback on color, then you get more useful feedback for the specific problem than if you asked, “What do you think of my poster?” Broad questions like, “Does this look good?” tend to elicit vague answers that don’t help you much. Even if you’re the one reviewing your own work, follow this same principle. Don’t just stare at the overall design and wait to feel like it’s wrong. Try asking yourself if the headline is strong enough or if it would be easy to pick up reading in the body copy, or perhaps if your alignment actually feels like it would have worked better. Again, you’ll be improving faster when feedback is directly tied to a visible design problem rather than how something looks at a glance.
A lot of people fall into the trap of making too many changes at once and too frequently. Someone will receive feedback, go ahead and make those changes, then receive different feedback and make other changes without ever really knowing what made it work or not work. You need to pause before acting on feedback and see if there are any patterns. If multiple bits of feedback all point towards something, like it has too little contrast or doesn’t balance right, then you should definitely do something about that. However, if a bit of feedback completely deviates from the direction you’re going, then maybe you shouldn’t act on it right away. Not all feedback should be considered equal. You should be much more concerned with patterns than you should with singular opinions. Knowing that distinction is helpful in graphic design because you don’t want to change your visual direction to just fit any and every opinion, but you should know when you need some improvements.
A short exercise can help you learn how to do this without it getting overwhelming. Find something simple to work on. Try using a headline, one sentence paragraph, and one shape or image, whichever you’d prefer. Build a first draft of this in five minutes, then get feedback from someone, or if no one is available, just review it, but only about that specific design aspect of your layout like visual hierarchy or spacing. Now, make a second draft using one very specific change as a result of your review or your feedback. In the last five minutes, put your first draft and second draft side by side and write one sentence about what is better about the second and one sentence about what still doesn’t feel quite right. It’s that last step that’s really important because it forces you to translate that feedback into visual terms. The better you are at identifying exactly what you’re looking at, the easier it is going to be to fix that in a future piece of design.
A little bit of feedback on the technical craft of your layout is very different from feedback on how the layout should feel. If someone comments that your text is too dense or your margins are inconsistent or the focal point is ambiguous, these are comments about your technical execution. You can use these comments to improve your execution. Other comments, such as your design should be a lot more vibrant or it should have a more organic quality, may also be worth acting on, but you have to figure out what a change like that looks like first. They are more like general descriptions of what it will feel like rather than a direction on how to get there. It’s important not to get stuck in the trap of thinking that these more general comments translate literally. If the feeling is that the layout should be softer, you may need more white space or less variety in font weights or an even smoother flow. Figuring out how to translate general thoughts into specific design choices is one of the most important skills in graphic design.
In short, useful feedback on design should feel a bit less like an approval or disapproval and more like a diagnosis. It helps to not take feedback quite so personally if you begin to think of it more as a list of technical things like spacing, clarity, focus, and rhythm, rather than how good or bad it generally is. That change will make critique easier to take. The designs will be easier to evaluate when you can look at them with that kind of detachment. Once you do start to see it like that, you will be using feedback to actually enhance the kind of visual thinking and design you are trying to build, rather than pulling you away from it.
