As a design artist, more specifically as a design artist who designs other people’s brand identities, you might often face this dilemma when you kill your creativity for customer satisfaction. The symptoms of this dilemma might range from mild unhappiness to extreme frustration.
You will be asked to redo an extremely good and absolutely unique logo design idea just because your customer thinks it is girly, or masculine, too heavy on eyes or so easy to ignore. You would feel angry and you should. But, anger does not bring you any jobs. So you hide your anger and you redo the design keeping in mind your clients feedback and changing it to meet their needs. It kills your heart the way you are destroying an astonishing piece of work to satisfy some non-design person who does not even know what “tint” means.
This half heartedness takes the focus away from you and the end product is something neither you nor your client can look at.
They key is to take client input seriously and consider it as a creative challenge. For example you have done a logo with bright sun drowning in the horizon and your client asks you to decrease the orange and add more blue to the horizon. You can get frustrated and create a purple horizon, or you can take this as a challenge. Don’t get upset over how silly this sounds; instead think of ways to add more blue. If you put your creative mind to it you will definitely find out ways to use blue.
To some very successful design artists customer input has helped them create some of the most memorable logos of all time. Raymond Lowey was considered father of the Industrial Design. Below is an example of sketches he did for the Exxon Logo. Most of his ideas were rejected and the one that was selected was not Lowey’s first choice. Below is a photograph of his suggested ideas and then the picture of the final logo.
