Not every design will land. The trick is knowing the difference between work that missed and work that just wasn’t yours.
Early in my career, when I was designing wedding stationery, a bride sent me a screenshot.
We’d been going back and forth for weeks. I’d send her a custom concept, something built around her, meant to look like no one else’s. She’d send it back: not quite. I’d send another. Not quite. Then the screenshot arrived. A wedding invitation from a template site. Not “inspired by.” Not “something in this spirit.” That one. “I want this,” she wrote. “From this site.”
I was kind about it, and I was patient. But I kept going when I should have stopped. I felt the small sinking feeling that tells you something is off, and instead of listening to it, I sent more concepts, each one gently nudging her toward what I thought was missing.
What I didn’t understand yet was that she had already chosen. Just not me. She wanted a look she’d found and loved, made hers. That’s a completely fair thing to want. It just isn’t what I do. I start from a blank page and build something that couldn’t belong to anyone else. She wasn’t the wrong bride. She was the wrong bride for me.
And we could have both known that in week one, if I’d been honest about what I make and asked a few real questions about what she wanted. Not to impress her. Just to find out if we were looking for the same thing.
These days, I design brands, murals, and whole innovation spaces. That bride’s lesson came with me, because it was never really about paper, or a wedding suite made for a single day. It was about how I approach design, all of it. But it took another moment, years later, for me to understand the other half of it.
I designed a mural for one of our offices. The leader of that office didn’t like it. That alone wouldn’t have surprised me. What he said was that it was “poor craftsmanship.”
That one still floors me a little. It wasn’t poorly made. It just wasn’t his.
That’s the part I think leaders miss. “I don’t like it” and “it isn’t good” are two completely different sentences, but in a lot of rooms they sound exactly the same, especially when the person saying them is the most senior one there. Good work gets killed that way every day. Not because it failed, but because it wasn’t someone’s taste, and nobody felt they could tell the difference out loud.
The bride knew the difference. She never said my work was bad. She just knew it wasn’t hers. Honestly, that’s the more generous response.
Not every design will land, and it shouldn’t. Some people will walk past the mural. Some will think the color is too bold, the space too quiet, the idea too strange. Work designed to land with everyone usually lands with no one. It gets sanded down until it’s polite and forgettable. The work that matters is made for someone in particular, and it’s allowed to miss everyone else.
So if you make things for a living, be clear about what you make, and let it find its people. The ones who want it will bring you better work than the ones you have to convince.
And if you’re the one deciding, start with work that already makes you feel something, then let that person do what they do. And before you reject something, ask yourself which sentence you actually mean. “This isn’t good” or “this isn’t mine.” Both are allowed. Only one of them is a verdict on the work.
As for me, I’ve gotten more careful about where my energy goes. I’d rather pour it into the people who walk in and feel something than into the one person who never will. That’s where the best work happens, and it’s where I want to be.
