- [Instructor] When it comes to the creative process,
you can do everything right.
You've done the due diligence upfront
in discovery and strategy to properly research
and understand your client and their audience.
You've worked out appropriate concepts
through ideation and exploration.
You've created design directions with precision and care,
and you present a diverse range of potential logos
to a client to choose from, but then it happens.
The client doesn't like anything you've done.
The creative process isn't perfect.
Pardon me as I use a baseball analogy.
I'd like to think that each of us has what I call
a design batting average.
In baseball, you only have to be successful
three out of 10 at-bats to be considered an all-star.
But when a client doesn't like anything you create
and you strike out, it can be very frustrating
and make you doubt your own abilities.
But my analogy fails at this point
because a strikeout in baseball is the fault of the batter,
but it's the design striking out
can be caused by a variety of situations,
since it all comes down to subjective decision-making.
You've probably heard someone say at some point,
art is subjective, but let's talk Cascade Lakes
and how this project has progressed.
This was the first round of design directions
we presented to Cascade Lakes,
and the committee reviewed them,
and the committee rejected them.
This confused me.
I went back to the creative brief
and re-read all of my notes to make sure
that we were in line with what I thought
was their expectations.
And in my opinion, we were,
but we still weren't finding a design
that they could agree on.
So I requested a mood board from the point man
I was communicating with just so I could get a radar fix
on their aesthetic.
And this is what they provided.
As I was looking at this,
I was seeing some of the aesthetic.
I understood what they're going for: a linear approach,
references to the Cascade Lakes region of Oregon
with a mountain and trees and those type of motifs,
graphics and simple type.
A modular type of design that can be removed
from the type as well.
They have a reference to Monotype here
and some simple graphics.
All of this made sense,
but I thought we accomplished a lot of this
in the first round.
But I decided and agreed to do a second round of designs
based off of this feedback,
and a couple of the other comments
that the contact person for the company gave me as well.
So we took that and worked out these new directions.
Now, one of the comments he gave me
was he wanted a few designs that kind of buck the system,
meaning they came out of left field unexpectedly,
to use another baseball analogy.
And those were the bear ones
with the bear with the antlers.
And part of that was referenced
to create the bear with the mountain range on his back.
That's more of a mystical thing
that's very popular here in Oregon.
And it captures the essence of nature
is what I was thinking there.
And then another one out of left field was the bottom row,
second from the left.
And it was the skull and mountain.
I didn't think that had any chance,
but he asked for some off-the-cuff ideas
and that was one of them.
The other design directions,
we kept the color palette simplified.
That was another one of his comments.
And we definitely referenced the Cascade Mountain Range
and lakes and trees to reflect what's common in nature.
So I thought these were on target
with the information they provided through their mood board
and some of their comments.
So we presented these to the committee as well.
And like the first round,
these were rejected also.
When it comes to a committee,
a committee isn't very good at agreeing on stuff.
What they're very good is agreeing on what they don't like,
but I had to ask myself, okay, why did this happen?
I don't understand why this happened.
We took in all the right information.
I used the same methodology I use with all of my clients
to really understand where they want to go,
what they want to achieve.
But in this case, we completely struck out.
Well, Eli Altman, in his book,
"Don't Call It That" has a really interesting principle.
He's a creative director.
He does a lot of brand naming for Silicone Valley brands.
But the principle he talks about,
can it be applied to a naming situation for a brand
or the logo itself for a brand?
Here's what he said,
"Nothing ruins creativity like too many voices weighing in.
We call it the Ice Cream Principle.
Tell 10 people to go get ice cream with one condition:
they all have to agree on one flavor.
That flavor is going to be chocolate or vanilla every time.
Groups of people don't agree on what's cool or interesting.
They agree on what's easy to agree on.
Don't pick a name strictly
because it's the top vote-getter."
You can replace name in this quote with a logo.
It's the same application of the Ice Cream Principle.
So we presented a lot of choices
that this company could have isolated on one
and moved forward with,
but instead, they went vanilla.
Hired an interior designer who pasted together clip art,
and this is what they could all agree on.
This whole experience left us feeling, frankly,
like a failure.
It was humbling and disappointing to say the least.
We invoiced the work we had done to this point
in the project and closed it.
The one positive is it made me realize
I had to use this story to reinforce the reality
we all face as creatives.
So in that respect, I hope it helps you.
Even projects that go through more established agencies
run into these type of problems.
I was hired by an agency to rebrand Deerfield Park District.
This was their existing logo and yes,
I felt I could improve upon it.
This was my favorite design direction we came up with.
Of course, we created a lot of other design directions.
The deers look similar,
but there's subtle attributes of each
that are a little different.
We took each direction and mocked it up in a way,
such as on a County vehicle to show them
how it could live in the real-world.
This is to demystify them and help them to envision usage.
The agency loved it.
I loved it.
And the client loved it when the agency
presented it to them.
They selected four of our directions
and asked for very subtle revisions to them.
That's fine. That's acceptable.
We did that.
The agency presented the revised directions
to the committee, and the committee chose
to stay with their old logo.
What? How did this happen?
When the marketing director called me and explained this,
my response was, of course they did.
It wasn't that the committee didn't like anything.
They clearly did.
They were unsure if they wanted to do it at this time.
And thus decided to stick with what they have
for the meantime.
Why did this happen?
Well, legendary designer, Paul Rand
explains this behavior well.
And Paul Rand's quote is something
that's relatively new to me.
I only heard about this quote two years ago,
but it makes complete sense,
and I want to share it with you now.
"The public is more familiar with bad design
than good design.
It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design,
because that is what it lives with.
The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring."
So if we take a look at their old,
and one of the directions that could have been their new,
they decided to stick with the old,
because it's familiar to them.
They've seen it, it reassures them.
The new one, they're not sure about.
It's never existed in the real world.
They don't know how people will respond to it.
So it's a safe choice to stick with the old.
Now, they asked me if I could take this old one
and just drop in new type and do some type exploration.
And this is where I pushed back a little bit.
I go, how about this?
We can focus on the old one now,
but how about you just let me refresh it a little?
And we can refresh it by improving the elements.
We're not going to fundamentally change
the layout and design.
We're just going to improve the visual aesthetic.
And that's what we did.
This is the improvement on that.
It looks better. It works better.
And this is the stage we're at now.
And it will be presented to them.
And we'll see what they say.
The problems aren't always committees, though.
A lot of different factors can affect a design project
that are out of our control.
So I want to share one more design story with you.
This is Artigiani.
They're a gelato company based out of the Chicago area.
And this was their existing logo
when the owner contacted me and said, I'd like a new brand.
I don't really like the one we're using.
It wasn't designed very well. I agreed with him.
And over the course of about, almost a month,
we finally developed the new brand for him.
And I think this looks great. It's going to work well.
And then he wanted to redo all of his packaging,
since we're redesigning his brand,
and we changed the colors of his brand as well.
So, we started working on the wraps for the containers
that's going to hold the gelato.
Here's Caribbean Coconut.
And I think this came out great.
Here's one for Cookies 'N Cream.
Everything was going great. The logo was done.
All the packaging files were done
and I was setting everything up,
and delivering it to the client.
And then I get a call from the client and he says,
well, I've decided not to use anything.
And I go, what? Do you not like the design?
Oh, I love the design.
I go, then, I don't understand. What's going on?
He said, well, I was excited.
And I contacted our distributor
and I showed him our new logo and our new packaging.
And the distributor responded by saying,
he liked the old packaging better.
I mean, there's no comparison, aesthetically,
of the old packaging and the new.
The new is better.
But, that influenced the owner.
The owner decided not to move forward with the new branding,
not because it's not better.
It clearly is.
It's because he had a distribution contract
with the distributor for $200,000,
and he was afraid he could potentially lose that
if he moved forward with his rebrand.
I can't control that.
That's out of my control.
Over the years, I've had many designs rejected, not picked,
never used, and even scoffed at from those exercising
their subjective decision-making.
I'm okay with that type of feedback,
because you'll always create more work
that'll never be used than work that will be used.
That is design reality.
I love creating work that makes my clients happy
and enables them to market their business more successfully.
But when a project goes off the rails
for any number of reasons, outside of my control,
it can be a soul-crushing experience.
It may not be the norm, but it's no fun when it does happen.
So take heart.
Learn from each experience and do the best job you can.