The Edge That Turns Great Outcomes into Frustration-Free Wins
You’ve engaged a pro, you’ve paid the deposit, and the initial round of logo designs arrives. Yet, something doesn’t quite click. Perhaps the color palette doesn’t quite work. Perhaps the icon doesn’t quite capture the essence you envisioned. Perhaps you’re just having trouble putting your finger on it, but you know it just isn’t there yet.
The path you choose here will either lead to a final product you absolutely adore or a never-ending cycle of changes and tweaks that never quite get there.
One of the most overlooked but powerful determinants of the success of your logo design project in Malaysia is the quality of the feedback you offer to your designer.
Your designer, no matter how skilled, cannot read your mind. They’re only able to work with the information you offer, and poor or inaccurate feedback results in a process of changes and tweaks that wander aimlessly, never quite reaching a satisfactory outcome.
This guide provides a practical and actionable framework for communicating effectively with your designer to ensure the process flows smoothly and the final outcome is a logo you’re proud to call your own.
Why Most Feedback Fails — And What to Do Instead
Before we look at the different techniques, it’s worth briefly considering why clients often find it hard to give effective feedback on logo designs.
The underlying reason for the failure of most clients to give effective feedback on logo designs is always the same. Feedback needs to be about the brand, not the person.
Phrases such as “I don’t like this,” “make it more modern,” “could it be more colorful,” or “it just doesn’t feel right” tell the designer absolutely nothing.
Professional logo design work for a business in Malaysia is not about the designer’s or the client’s personal taste. The most important thing a client can do for a designer is to evaluate the logo, not by reference to their own likes and dislikes, but by reference to what the brand needs to say to its target audience.
The difference between giving feedback as a function of personal preference and giving feedback as a function of brand effectiveness is the biggest single step you can take to improve your feedback.
Step One: Revisit the Brief Before You Respond
Before you start writing any feedback, go back and review the original brief. Re-read the goals that were established at the beginning: the audience, the personality of the brand, the industry, and the key messages that the logo should communicate. Evaluate each design based on these criteria, not your emotional response.
- – Does this design convey the right personality based on the original brief?
- – Will our audience respond to this design as we hope they will?
- – Does this design help us stand out from our key competitors in a way that’s significant?
- – Will this design work as we need it to across the mediums we’ll be using it on, whether that’s online or offline?
Taking ten minutes to think about your feedback will allow you to write much more useful feedback than your gut instinct. It will also keep the process focused on the goals that were established at the beginning of the process, rather than wandering into subjective territory where nothing is ever good enough.
Step Two: Be Specific About What’s Working and What Isn’t
Good feedback will include both positive and negative aspects of each concept. It’s important to know what to keep and what to change.
A good feedback process can be broken down into three categories:
- What’s Working: What’s moving in the right direction that should be continued or enhanced in the next round of concepts, such as the overall layout, color palette, feel and style of the typography, or general direction.
- What Isn’t Working: What’s not working in each concept with a clear explanation for why it’s not working. Instead of “I don’t like the font,” it’s “the font feels too casual for a professional services firm targeting corporate clients.”
- What’s Not Clear: What’s not clear to you that you wish you could see more of, or what’s not been addressed yet in any of the concepts.
This process helps the designer make changes that are improvements upon the work already completed, rather than having to start over from scratch.
Step Three: Describe Problems, Not Solutions
This is one of the most important principles to keep in mind when giving feedback on a logo design project in Malaysia. This principle might be difficult for clients to comply with because it involves not telling the designer what to do.
The designer’s professional obligation is to design. Therefore, by pointing out the problem, you are allowing the designer to use his or her expertise to solve it.
Instructing a designer on what to do with regard to a design problem will not only deny the designer the opportunity to use his or her expertise to solve the problem but will probably result in a worse outcome than if he or she had a free hand to explore the problem within set boundaries.
Let’s compare two feedback options:
Unhelpful feedback:
“Make the icon rounder and put it to the right of the text instead of above the text.”
Helpful feedback:
“The current layout seems a bit formal and static for a dynamic and friendly brand. I want to explore a layout that seems more energetic or more contemporary.”
The unhelpful feedback micromanages the designer’s work and denies the designer the opportunity to explore and discover what works best. The helpful feedback clearly communicates the problem with the design and allows the designer to use his or her expertise to solve it.
According to Paula Scher, a renowned designer and principal of Pentagram since 1991, the best client-designer relationship is one based on trust for the designer’s expertise, combined with a clear sense of direction on what the designer needs to accomplish. Such trust enables excellent design to happen.
Step Four: Consolidate Feedback From All Stakeholders
In case there are a number of people involved in the approval process for the logo design, such as the co-founder, senior manager, marketing lead, and so on, it is important to consolidate all feedback into one, unified feedback before giving it back to the designer.
Working with mixed feedback from various stakeholders can be like navigating against the currents. Someone might want more color, another might want simplicity; someone might love the icon, another might hate it. It’s like being caught between two currents, which puts the designer in a difficult position. It’s sure to be a tedious process for everyone.
Before sending your feedback notes, it’s essential to have your internal affairs in order. It’s not about you; it’s about the brand. Sometimes this internal dialogue can reveal underlying differences of opinion about the direction the brand should go in. These are important issues to work out before they become design issues.
A logo designer in Malaysia will likely want to work with only one person for this very reason. It’s essential to respect this to protect the quality of the process and your eventual investment.
Step Five: Use Visual References Deliberately
Visual references, such as logos, brands, design styles you like, can be very helpful in giving feedback, but only if you do it correctly.
Correct Approach: You can use visual references to convey how you feel about a certain quality or style that you like, along with what specifically you like about it. For example: “I love how this logo uses negative space to convey two meanings.
Can we try to do something similar with our brand?” You are expressing a very specific quality you like, not copying another designer’s work.
Wrong Approach: Sending over references to copy or imitate. “Make our logo look like this” completely bypasses the entire design process, which will result in copying another designer’s work, not coming up with an original logo identity, and probably not suitable for your brand’s needs either.
When working with a logo design professional in Malaysia, it’s important to understand how they will use your visual references. It’s like using a language to communicate design directions that are difficult to put into words.
Step Six: Trust the Timeline and the Process
Feedback two weeks after the concepts were delivered, and the added pressure of rolling fifteen changes into one package, is no picnic for a designer working on multiple client projects.
Respect the process you established at the beginning of the project. Be quick to respond, typically within two or three business days after the concepts were delivered.
And limit the feedback process to the most important changes, rather than amassing a slew of small changes over time and then delivering them all at once.
Successful logo design projects in Malaysia have a smooth process that begins with concepts, then feedback, then further development, and finally delivery.
There’s a flow from one step to the next. A disruption in this process, caused by untimely or overwhelming feedback, can extend the process, inflate costs beyond the original agreement, and disrupt the process that’s meant to bring the best possible outcome with the greatest efficiency.
What good feedback looks like
To illustrate these points, here’s a sample of good, useful feedback for a logo concept:
“Concept B, to me, is the strongest of the two. The color scheme works well for our target audience, and the overall look and feel of the logo exude the level of confidence and professionalism we discussed in the brief. However, the biggest problem for me is the icon.
While it’s clean and simple, it doesn’t really stand out or give us a level of uniqueness compared to the competition. I think it would be great to explore a more unique or specific idea for the icon, but keep the level of confidence and professionalism of this direction. The typography is looking good and should be kept.”
Can you see how this works? This style of feedback identifies the positive, the negative, and how the negative could be improved, and provides clear guidance for how to proceed. This is the level of feedback to strive for for your best company logo design Malaysia project.
The key to great logos is great teamwork. A great logo results from a business owner who understands their business inside and out, and a designer who understands the craft of visual communication.
When both people come to the table with their expertise, their ability to communicate, and their respect for the other, the final result is far greater than the sum of the two individuals’ abilities.
Your contribution to the process of creating a new logo for your business is to provide clear, strategic, specific, and trusting feedback. This may be more important to the final outcome than you think. If you can master this process, you won’t just get a better logo, you’ll get the full benefit of the logo design investment you’re making.
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