Updated June 14, 2026
If you’ve never worked with a graphic designer before, the process can feel a little mysterious. You know what you want your business to achieve. You have opinions about what looks good. But translating all of that into useful direction for a creative professional — and then knowing how to respond when they show you their work — is a skill that most people have never been taught.
Done well, the client-designer relationship is one of the most productive collaborations in business. Done poorly, it produces mediocre work, burned budgets, and a lot of frustration on both sides.
Here’s how to make sure you’re in the first camp.
Step one: the brief
The success of any creative project depends on good communication upfront. Before a designer can do their best work, they need to understand your company, your goals, your audience, and your taste. A good designer will ask you a lot of questions at the start — sometimes through a formal creative brief, sometimes through a discovery conversation. Either way, take this seriously. Think your answers through carefully. The quality of the work you get back is directly proportional to the quality of the information you put in.
This is also the moment to be honest about things you don’t like. If you have a strong aversion to a particular color, a font style, or a visual approach, say so now. It’s much easier to work around a known preference than to discover it in round three.
Step two: the presentation
Once the designer has done their work, they’ll present initial concepts — usually more than one, to give you a sense of the range of possibilities. A few things to keep in mind as you look at them:
All of the concepts should be on message, distinctive, memorable, and reflective of your company’s personality. If they’re not, that’s worth naming. But if they are — and you just don’t immediately love any of them — don’t panic. Creative development is a process, not a reveal. Your response to what you see is the next step in getting to the right answer, not the final verdict.
Step three: the review
This is where clients most often go wrong — either by making decisions too quickly, or by outsourcing their judgment to too many people. Here’s a more reliable approach:
How to give your designer feedback that actually works
- First impression. Look at each concept and note your gut reaction — most to least favorite. This is your working list. Share these initial impressions with the designer but ask for time to sit with the work before they proceed further.
- Sit on it. Pin the concepts somewhere you’ll see them for a day or two. Live with them. Come back to them fresh. You’ll notice things you didn’t catch in the first five minutes, and your initial rankings may shift. Note anything that keeps catching your eye — positively or negatively.
- Confer with few, not many. It’s fine to get a second opinion — or a third. But don’t poll everyone you know. Nothing derails a creative project faster than the client returning with feedback from their sister’s neighbor’s babysitter’s boyfriend who is good with color because he’s a house painter. Choose two or three people whose taste, honesty, and knowledge of your business you trust. Evaluate their input, then go back to your own working list and decide whether it changes anything.
- Remove your irrational prejudices. This is the hard one. If you’re discounting a concept because it reminds you of your first grade teacher’s favorite sweater and you hated your first grade teacher — recognize that for what it is. If the reason you’re rejecting something is so personal that no one else would share or even notice it, set it aside. Every decision should be made from one standpoint only: what is best for your brand and your audience.
- Review and reorder. Go back through your notes, reorder your list, and check your top choice against the original criteria: is it on message, distinctive, memorable, versatile, and reflective of your company’s unique personality?
- Communicate your response clearly. Just as good direction at the start shapes the work, good feedback at this stage shapes what comes next. A few guidelines:
- Always explain the why behind your reactions. “I don’t like this” is less useful than “this feels too formal for our audience.”
- It’s completely fine to ask for edits to a specific concept, or to ask whether elements from two different concepts could be combined. The designer may have reasons why that won’t work, but the conversation is always worth having.
- Share everything. Don’t hold back a thought because you’re not sure it’s relevant. Let the designer decide what’s useful.
Step four: repeat
After receiving your feedback the designer reworks the concepts, and then you repeat step three. If the designer is good and your communication is clear, you should arrive at a final concept within the first couple of rounds.
The main point is this: your role as the client is every bit as important as the designer’s. Creativity and professionalism on their end, clear direction and honest feedback on yours — that combination is what produces work you’ll be proud of.
Ready to start a project? Let’s talk. And if you want to understand more about the dynamics of working with a designer, this post on creative collaboration is worth a read.
