Subjective vs. Objective
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- luckyorphan
Hey all,
I'm in the middle of educating my non-designer supervisors (MBAs, PhDs, etc) on the difference between something being deemed "bad work" and "a difference of opinion."
Anyone got any good examples of subjective vs. objective differences in terms of Creative Direction?
Many thanks.
- Horp0
Yeah,
Your work = bad
Your opinion = subjective.
- i_monk0
If you can quibble over the details, it's a difference of opinion. If you can't demonstrate that your design solves the problem, it's bad work.
- antagonista0
I object to your subjective view of details. The quality of good work is defined by the attention to detail.
- ********0
- cannada0
Good typography trumps all.
Distressed fonts = bad.
- ********0
It's BS. All art is subjective. Unless of course, there was some sort of guideline or task that was asked of it (which shouldn't ever be required). Ex: make sure this quadrant includes this many shades of yellow, etc. I mean WTF?
However, if you were to use some sort of data, randomly testing 1000 people and they voted on it and it ended up getting shit reviews, ok, it could be deemed as crap.
- wow - did you just make sense?aldebaran
- << No.luckyorphan
- luckyorphan0
^^
This isn't art. It's design. There's a difference.And that's not subjective.
- vaxorcist0
I'd switch the discussion terms amongst people like this....
What's the difference between Descriptive and Prescriptive feedback.
Descriptive: I feel like it's hard to read because I have bifocals and I'm standing too far from the screen
Prescriptive: Make the fonts bigger
Descriptive is your Experience
Prescriptive is what you'd do if you were the designer, which you ARE NOT- Interesting approach...I'll play with that. Thanks.luckyorphan
- vaxorcist0
Another way to go about this....
Part 1: Establish WHO exactly is the target market, be very precise, come up with a fictional person or two, like... for a certain youth-oriented campaign, "joe is a 15 year old skateboarder with hudreds of tatoos" and "jane is a suicide-gurl wannabee who's his little sister"
Part 2: Make damn sure the client knows he is NOT the target market, and he's probably 20 years older and much richer,etc
Part 3: Establish that you are MORE AWARE of the target market's mindset than the client
Part 4: Show designs, whenever client has a random suggestion that's based on his non-target-market thinking, say "but that idea isn't applicable to the target market"
- but don't reject every client idea too fast, sometimes say 'That's great, but for annother project"vaxorcist
- carianoff0
There is only a few ways to win a debate or educate someone how to perceive something that is seemingly subjective as the "right" way to do something. Start with what all aesthetic rules are based on, things like the golden ratio, fibonacci sequence and other hard data that is present in nature that give us a starting point for all art and design.
The Bauhaus is also a great place to look because everyone there was obsessed in distilling the essence of visual communication into logical rules. Kandinsky did alot of interesting research on how humans react to shape and color. (Point and line to plane).
A simple lesson in visual hierarchy would yield logical result in why things should be this and not that. Grade everything on a design in order of importance and assign proper scale, placement and effect to achieve and enforce the grades assigned to each of the visual elements.
Start there.