Bad design does not exist. Only emotional responses do.
What’s good design or bad design? The answer is completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to me at least. To whom it matters then? To the owner of the design, of course. Customers are out of the equations because they have no control over it.
Our responses to a design are totally different from one another and that’s natural. Which begs a question: Why is this design good or bad for the owner?
What does he like about it? What does she want to say through it? What are they trying to achieve? It is not my place nor productive for me to judge other people’s design from my point of view. No. It’s much more meaningful for others if I could ask questions and listen. I can’t turn off my subjective response. But what I can do is to use my emotional response as a trigger to ask some objective questions.
Looking back into my past conversations, now I see them as not even conversations. Anxious monkey talking like a robot was more like it. Obviously, I was not listening. Oh, I missed so many clues! If I were really listening, I could’ve picked up what they were really saying: I’m anxious. I’m overworked. I’m bored. I’m not sure about my direction. I need help in this and that but I don’ know how to say it. They were saying all that but I could not understand them.
If I could define my job as a designer not as a professional who pretends to know what’s beautiful and what’s not, but as a person who tries to understand what’s useful for my clients, I think I could be more helpful as a professional and niceful (is that a real word?) as a regular person.
