The Work is Not You

I live life on a pendulum swing.

On one end: a god complex so complete that I genuinely believed, at nineteen, that everything I made was excellent. On the other hand, a freefall into “I have no idea what I’m doing; everything I make sucks.” There is rarely a middle setting. Ask my best friends from high school.

I grew up painting still lives of fruit at my artist grandmother’s kitchen counter and building cardboard box castles with my sisters. I had no formal training, no AP art classes, and absolutely no working knowledge of the Adobe Suite (or honestly, of computers at all). So when I showed up to my freshman year of college and started making things—drawing, designing, figuring it out—I was quietly proud of what I produced. Proud in the way you are when you can’t yet see what you don’t know.

My university’s design program worked on a cut system. Of 300 incoming students, only 80 would be accepted into the program after the first semester. You presented your portfolio and completed creative exercises live in front of a panel of judges. I looked around the room at work made by kids who’d been doing AP Art for years. I started preparing myself to switch majors.

They let me in anyway. And then the following year, when the class was cut again from 80 to 30, I survived that, too.

I tell you this not as a success story but as context. Because what came next is where I actually learned something.

My first design-centered class was image-making and illustration, taught by a professor so sullen and cutting that most of my peers despised him. He made dry comments. Sometimes hurtful ones. He carried a red Sharpie and an X-Acto knife in his pocket at all times, and on critique days, he wandered the room marking up our designs or slicing pieces off. If you got the acronym KTB written on your work, it was a crass way of saying “kill your darlings.” Start over. He taught us that our first idea was rarely the best.

At the time, it felt brutal. Looking back, it was preparation.

We were constantly on defense in that class. Not defensively, but ready to defend our work. He demanded that we be able to explain our research, our thought process, and our application. Everything had to be justifiable. And if he just didn’t like it, we had to make a case: why this color, why this typeface, why this composition, why the discomfort you’re feeling is actually the point. Why is this thing that doesn’t look like everything else appropriate for this project?

Sometimes we swayed him. Sometimes we didn’t, and we swallowed our pride and began again.

What he was teaching us (though he never said it this way) was how to separate the work from yourself. Your feelings about the work are not a defense. The work has to stand on its own logic.

Some good advice from David Shrigley

My first job out of school put me inside a studio, and I had a new set of variables to balance. Now I wasn’t designing to please a professor with a grade. I was designing to satisfy a Creative Director and an end client simultaneously. The things I made had actual weight. They would live on letterheads, on packages, on social media, in the world. A wedding planner would hand a business card to a bride. A celebrity spice brand would sit on a shelf next to competitors with ten times the budget.

But here’s what I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: I was shielded. My Art Director fielded the client calls. She presented the work, defended it, absorbed the feedback, and then relayed what I needed to know. The person I was most desperately trying to please was my team. Set them up for success. Give them a defense. Give them a win. At twenty-two, still nervous to hop on a client call, that insulation was exactly what I needed.

It was also a crutch I didn’t realize I was leaning on.

The first time I sat directly across from a client with no buffer, I understood immediately what I hadn’t been building.

The client doesn’t speak design. This sounds obvious. It isn’t until you’re trying to explain a color palette to someone who just keeps saying, “It feels wrong.” In the studio, I would have said to use a “cool-neutral” for the concept, and a colleague would have nodded, fully understanding my rationale because we were both taught a similar design-thinking scale. But with a client, I had to explain why this specific palette was the right choice for their wellness skincare line, how it signals restraint, science, and the deliberate absence of health-washing. I had to explain color psychology in plain language to someone who just wanted to know whether their customers would pick it up off the shelf.

That translation muscle took years to build. And it’s the muscle that makes feedback conversations actually work.

Because here’s what vague feedback almost always is: a client telling you something true about how they feel, in the only language they have. “It doesn’t feel right” is not a design note. It’s a door. Your job is to walk through it and find out what’s actually on the other side.

Is it a fear? (”My competitors look more established than this.”) A mismatch between expectation and result? (”I thought it would feel more premium.”) Something they saw that they can’t unsee? (”My husband thinks it looks dated.”) Every one of those is a brief in disguise. Your job is to interview the feedback until you find the actual problem.

Over time, I stopped being afraid of feedback conversations and started treating them as the most useful part of the process. Not because they stopped stinging (some of them still do), but because I changed what I thought they meant.

When a client doesn’t like something, it isn’t because they don’t trust me or trust my design abilities. They wouldn’t have hired me if that were true. They want what’s best for their business. They want a strong return on their investment. Once I understood where they were actually coming from, the feedback stopped being about me.

Design is an art, yes. But more importantly, it’s a service. It’s a skill that can take someone’s project from hobby to in-store placement, to viral, to in-demand. It can position a brand in the exact way its customers see themselves. People judge with their eyes before they listen with their ears. What you make can determine whether something sells.

Park your ego and design as a service.

One of the best books I’ve ever read on this, which helped both my career and my personal life, was Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. The argument, essentially, is that all work is now service-industry work. What you do matters, but how you do it matters just as much, maybe more. I think about this constantly in how I run my studio: showing up fast, listening carefully, creating work that reflects what I actually heard during strategy, getting on actual calls instead of firing emails back and forth, being generous with revisions without letting scope creep swallow the project whole.

That’s not compromising the work. That’s respecting the person on the other side.

Which brings me back to the professor with the X-Acto knife.

He wasn’t wrong. You do need to be able to defend the work. You need to be able to say, calmly and clearly, why the choices you made were right for the project, and to hold that position when the pushback comes from discomfort rather than reason.

But the working world taught me the other half of that lesson. The goal isn’t to win the argument. The goal is to make something that works. Sometimes those are the same thing. Sometimes they aren’t.

A medium-sized ego is what you’re after: big enough to defend the work with conviction, but small enough to hear what’s true in the criticism. Too big and you stop learning; clients feel steamrolled and stop trusting you. Too small and you give everything away; the work becomes a mirror of whoever’s in the room, and it loses the thing that made it good.

The feedback isn’t a verdict on you. Let it be the thing that challenges your work and strengthens your service arm.

Five Things I’d Tell a Designer Dreading Their Next Presentation

These aren’t rules. There are things that took me years to figure out.

1. Translate before you react. When a client says “it doesn’t feel right,” your first job is not to defend or revise; it’s to understand. Ask: What were you hoping to feel? What does “right” look like to you? Is it a color thing, a layout thing, a vibe thing? Vague feedback is almost never about the thing it sounds like it’s about. Find the real problem before you solve anything. Don’t be afraid to hop on a call to chat it out with them.

2. Build a case, not an argument. There’s a difference between explaining your thinking and winning a debate. Explanation sounds like: “I chose this typeface because its structure signals clarity and trust, which aligns with what you told me in our strategy session about your ideal client.” Argument sounds like: “Well, this would look better in the typography system.” One invites the client into your process. The other shuts the door. You want them in the room with you.

3. Know what’s yours to protect. Not everything is worth defending. What color reflects your personal taste? Let it go. The strategic decision is grounded in your research and their brief. Hold it. Before any feedback conversation, be honest with yourself about what’s actually serving the work versus what’s serving your ego. If you can’t tell the difference in the room, you’ll either give in on everything or dig in on the wrong things.

4. Separate the emotional hit from the actionable information. Feedback that stings has two parts: the bite and the note. You don’t have to respond to both at the same time. It is completely fine to say, “I appreciate the feedback. Let me sit with this and come back to you.” Give yourself enough distance to hear the actual information without the reaction riding shotgun.

5. Design is a service. Let that be freeing! This one took me the longest. The moment I stopped needing the work to be a testament to my originality and started thinking about it as something that serves a real person’s real business, the whole thing got lighter. The work is still mine. The thinking is still mine. The craft is still mine. But it isn’t for me. It never was! And once you make peace with that, the feedback stops feeling like a threat.