I’ve been on both sides of a design review for twenty five years. I’ve handed over concepts and watched a room go quiet. I’ve also sat in the client chair on my own projects and struggled to explain why the thing in front of me wasn’t right.

Design feedback is hard because design is collaborative and subjective, and there’s no answer key. Most people were never taught how to talk about visual work, so they reach for the words they’ve heard other people use, and those words tend to be useless.

I wrote about this in 2022 and the advice has held up. One thing has changed since then, and it’s changed enough that it gets its own section at the bottom.

Name what you see

“Make it pop” has no measurable direction in it. Neither does “I don’t love it” or “can we make it more modern.”

Name the element. The typeface, the color, the photo, the spacing, the order things happen in. You don’t need the vocabulary to be right. “The headline feels heavy compared to everything under it” tells me exactly where to look, and I’ll translate that into a type weight change in about four seconds.

Here’s a practice run. Pick up any magazine cover and say one specific thing you’d change. Not “it’s busy.” Something closer to “four things are competing for my eye at the top and I’d pick one.”

Give me the problem, not the fix

“Make this bigger” is a solution. “My audience is over sixty and I think this is going to be hard for them to read” is a problem.

The second one gets you a better result, because I might solve it with size, or with contrast, or with a different typeface. When you hand me the fix, you cap the outcome at whatever you already thought of.

Tell me what’s working

Rounds go sideways when every note is a correction. Two sentences about what working on the design saves an entire round.

Send pictures

Three sentences describing a vibe will lose to one screenshot every time. Send me things you like. Send me things you hate, which is more useful and which nobody ever sends. Competitor sites, packaging, a photo of a sign you saw on the way to work.

I can read the pattern across five images faster than I can decode a paragraph.

Ask why before you override

I’m going to have a reason for the thing you want changed. Sometimes it’s a good reason and sometimes it’s a habit, and you’re allowed to find out which one you’re dealing with.

“Why did you set it this way” is a question I like getting. It’s the same move as asking a doctor why they picked one treatment over another. You’re still the one deciding. You’re just deciding with more information.

Remember who it’s for

Your favorite color isn’t a brief. Neither is your spouse’s opinion or the thing your competitor did in 2019.

The project has a job and an audience, and both got defined at kickoff. When a note doesn’t trace back to one of those two things, I’m going to ask out loud whether we’re solving for the audience or for the room.

One voice, one set of notes

Committee feedback is five opinions and zero decisions. Somebody wants it warmer, somebody wants it bolder, and somebody replied on the wrong email thread.

Consolidate before you send. One person, one document, conflicts resolved.

Don’t run your design feedback through AI

This is the new one.

I’ve started getting client notes that read like a design school lecture. Balanced paragraphs, correct terminology, sentences like “consider strengthening the visual hierarchy to better guide the eye.” Nobody talks like that. What happened is somebody looked at the file, thought “the logo looks weird,” and asked ChatGPT to make it sound professional before hitting send.

I get it. Giving design feedback is uncomfortable when you don’t have the vocabulary, and nobody wants to sound uninformed in front of a vendor they’re paying.

Your reaction is the useful part. “Something about this feels cheap” is one of the best notes I can get, because I know how to fix it. I’ll go look at the photography, the type weight, the spacing, the paper stock if it’s headed to print. Once that same reaction comes back as “the treatment may benefit from a more premium material sensibility,” you’ve lost the plot and I have no idea what you mean.

The model can’t see the file. It’s generating general design principles, so the feedbakc applies to any project in the world, which makes it useless on this one.

Three real notes become a 20 item punch list, most of which was hallucinated, and now I’m reverse engineering which two sentences you care about.

The committee version is the worst one. Five stakeholders each run their notes through an AI model and I get five paragraphs that sound identical, say nothing, and contradict each other. What am I supposed to do with that?

You know your audience, your industry, your board, and why the last campaign underperformed. None of that context is baked into the AI model. Send me the messy version. “I hate the green, the top feels crowded, the third one is closest but the photo is wrong.” That’s ninety seconds of typing and I can work with it right away.

What good design feedback looks like

Short, specific, honest, and yours. Name what you see. Give me the problem instead of the fix. Flag what’s working. Send pictures. Ask why when you’re curious.

If you want a designer who’ll talk you through the reasoning instead of nodding at whatever shows up in the inbox, that’s the kind of work I do.