Did you ever get upset because your work has been rejected or was not treated with the ‘respect’ it deserved? Does criticism about your graphic design irritate you and you think sometimes that the feedback was not good because ‘they’ didn’t get it?

Maybe you are too attached to your projects.

Having the right distance helps react better to criticism and to understand if a feedback is valuable or not.

It’s the ‘watching from outside’ perspective. This perspective saves a lot of time and nerves.

Why are we attached to our work.
It’s not unusual to hear graphic designers and art directors talking about ‘their’ projects. Most of the time, it sounds like they created something extraordinary out of nothing.

I must admit that the terms used in the design community may mislead our thinking—terms like “creation” and “producer” want to suggest to us that a graphic designer produces or even better, ‘creates’ something.

We call them our babies, like they were born out of our mind.

This mindset binds us to the work and we think of it like it where our property. Something we have to protect and give shelter. Nobody should know about it until we are ready to show it, defended from criticism and enforced in the path it has taken. I’m exaggerating obviously, but I’m sure you get the point.

The reality: you are a ‘tool’
So lets take a step back and look at our projects from outside.

We have clients—these clients, in most cases, want to communicate to their clients/investors/customers/workforce. They want to sell/lease THEIR product.

The knowledge about this product and everything surrounding the product is property of the client. In fact, it is an integral part of their job.

The problem your client has lies in the configuration of this information. The information presents itself in ways to fit in the context of your client. Basically, the client needs the information to build the products.

Your job is to transform this knowledge to something the customers of your client find appealing. The knowledge to be able to do this is your property, not the materials you are working on. It’s in your head, so to speak. This is the service you provide—this is why you get paid.

What’s the deal
There is no point in being attached to something that is not yours. You don’t have to protect something that belongs to someone else. So if you get feedback about a project you can separate them into two categories:

1. It’s about the product or the information about it.
2. It’s about your ability to transform the information into something appealing.

You don’t have to care about if the feedback is about the product. I had quite a few projects canceled after the presentation, because they discovered through my work, that the product was not ready for the market.

They didn’t have the look ‘from outside’.

If it’s about your abilities as a graphic designer then you have to understand who is making such remarks. Comments about your abilities most of the time mean something else.

“This is a bad design” may just mean, “I don’t understand the message.”

If you look at it this way you have more options to address this. The cause can be readability, misunderstandings in the briefing, or simply that your skills lacked in one area.

None of these problems can’t be fixed, and to say it yet one more time: You don’t need to protect a design which doesn’t deliver the right message.

An Example



A client of mine opened an academy where his clients could attend seminars to market relevant topics. They briefed me, that the academy was to be self-contained financially and will become bigger with the years.

It should raise the awareness that my client was ‘the one’ who is the right partner in the sector he was operating—for products, services and everything else.



I made a logo and corporate design reflecting this briefing: It was based on the corporate design of the client but had to be different in order to let it stand on its own.

Like a cousin, not a child so to speak. The presentation went very well and my client liked my design, but…

1. He realized that it was too self-contained and too self-confident. Entering the education market so strongly was maybe not a good idea as they had partners in this market for years and they might see it as a danger to their market.

2. They had the impression that I didn’t pay enough back to the main brand in terms of authority.



Point 1 was their fault, point 2 mine because I wanted a strong self-confidence in the corporate design.

But I had no problem in changing the corporate design to conform the new briefing—its part of the process.

I made the “cousin” to a “son” and solved both problems by integrating the Academy into the corporate design of my client. Not much work and both the issues of too much self confidence and lack of authority transfer disappeared.



You can see that not holding on to tight on your work will benefit the project itself, you and your client. But one of the keys is good feedback.

Getting feedback the right way, on the other hand, is difficult and worth more than one future lesson.




Frank Neulichedl is an award-winning Art Director, specialising in corporate design and brand management for mid-size to big companies with international markets. He loves to share his knowledge with the community and answers to questions about branding, identity and art direction in his blog “How to become an Art Director”.