“I’ll know it when I see it.”

What do you do when a client doesn’t know what they want?

When a client is unsure what they want, the creative process can quickly become shaped by reactions and preferences. Thisness looks at what this familiar challenge can tell us about how designers and clients make creative decisions.

I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase many times. But how do you design towards something that can only be recognised once it exists?

When there is little else to judge against, each creative direction becomes something to react to. A direction is presented, the client responds, it changes, they respond again. Gradually, the project moves towards something that feels right.

There is a difference between using iteration to improve an idea and using it to discover what the idea needed to achieve in the first place.

The problem isn’t that the client doesn’t know what they want. Why should they know what the answer looks like? That’s part of the reason they are working with a designer.

What they do need is something more useful than a visual preference: an understanding of what the work needs to respond to and what it cannot afford to lose.

That gives both client and designer a basis for recognising why one creative direction is more appropriate than another.

Without that understanding, recognition can easily become preference. I like this. I don’t like that. This one feels more like us. The design may eventually arrive somewhere everyone is happy with, but the reasoning behind it remains difficult to trace.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether the client will know it when they see it, but what will allow them to know why.

The basis for that judgement has to begin before there is anything to see. This is the principle behind definition before design. The aim isn’t to remove instinct, preference or iteration from the creative process, but to give them something more meaningful to work with.

“I’ll know it when I see it” may be inevitable.

Knowing why shouldn’t be.