Failure by Design

12 min readMay 5, 2023

Why creative projects falter and solutions to keep them on track

When it comes to building brands, failure seems like a scary thing because we often boil failure down to a client not liking something that we think is actually quite good and will be successful for them. The idea of failure can manifest itself in any number of ways and should be accepted and embraced because it is a much broader and richer subject to consider when we make work. Projects almost never go as expected but we always get through them, learn from them, and the end product goes out in the world and has a life of its own. In this article I interrogate the idea of failure in creative work, what causes projects to not go perfectly, how we might see problems before they arise, and learn from our past missteps.

Failure is not something to be avoided but rather it should be recognized as a fundamental and ever-present companion in the creative and logistical aspects of any program. From the moment a project is green-lit, I immediately know that the idea I have in my mind as to how things will go will not come to fruition. I am not discouraged by this. Rather, I make peace with the idea that it is my responsibility to successfully get to the end goal no matter how the terrain of the project may change. Moving through any creative endeavor where clients and teams work together through a series of steps under a defined scope of work will always be an obstacle course of potential pitfalls to be confronted. The best course of action I have found is to tackle problems quickly and head on. Lingering issues only get worse. Below I have outlined a handful of common and not so common sources of trouble that can make a project turbulent, challenging and in need of immediate repair.

Creative fear

I have put creative fear first in my list because it is one of the biggest points of failure that is the most difficult to overcome. If a client is afraid to embrace new ideas and modern approaches to brand building it can completely take the wind out of a project’s creative sails. Having courage and taking risks makes life exciting and it’s what makes a brand memorable and differentiated. One of the most deflating things that can be chosen is a totally safe design solution.

The opposite of fear is courage and with focus and the right contextual framing, courage can be found and amplified even in the most conservative of sensibilities. In the context of brand creation, I have found that the only antidote for fear is a healthy dose of optimistic enthusiasm. The more people you can get to be excited about an ideal, the less scary it becomes. If you can get key leaders on board to advocate for a good solution and back up their opinion with a solid argument then the safe approach becomes weaker and the more interesting and courageous ideas have a fighting chance.

Lack of project experience

If your team and the client team do not have the same level of creative or technical experience and expertise then you will spend a great deal of time explaining and educating and less time making awesome work. At the kickoff of any project, make sure you spend time learning if your team and the client team speak the same language and have a similar level of knowledge and experience of the process to come. Perhaps your client is more marketing driven and not as design savvy. Maybe they have never been through a brand process. Perhaps their internal team has little technical knowhow. Whatever it is, find where the gaps are and make these known and address them. The same goes for your own team.

Once you know where the knowledge and experience gaps are, you should do everything in your power to carve out the proper time to align and get appropriately compensated if in-depth education is needed to level the playing field. The best way to approach educating is to talk about the risk the lack of knowledge and understanding has to the project’s overall success. If people do not have the knowledge or skills needed then new people need to be brought in or timelines need to shift. These can be tough things to discuss but as long as project success is the reasoning it’s hard to argue that it is not needed.

Divergent aesthetics

I dislike this one because sometimes it is hard to pin down. Aesthetics are tricky. Sometimes your team and the client team just don’t see the world in the same way. Convincing someone that an idea makes more sense than another is often a matter of visual taste. When this occurs, the first impulse is to jump into verbal defense and to explain, at length, why the approach you have arrived at makes the most sense. I have found that verbal debate does not really move things forward. It’s like debating what tastes better at a chili cookoff. It’s subjective.

The only solution is to show and compare so that you can get the majority on both sides to agree and support your thinking with clear and concise rationale. Real world examples are necessary. Compare and contrast things side by side so you can see the same thing. Sometimes your team may just “miss the mark” or the client feels the aesthetic approach does not align with the strategy. If this happens then you have to figure out quickly what does fit. It is a matter of solving the brand recipe by finding out what ingredients aren’t working (type, color, motion, photography, illustration, graphic device, logo) and what ingredients need to be added to complete the recipe.

Uncontrollable politics

The mysterious machinations of business can run any project afoul no matter how professional and well orchestrated. As an agency, you may not have complete visibility into internal client dynamics. You may be moving happily through a project scope while behind the scenes there may be a lack of internal alignment, core level dysfunction, or tumultuous leadership changes lurking below the surface waiting to sabotage the whole game.

The hardest of these to confront is C-Suite veto power. Sometimes no amount of strategic rationale, audience data, and good energy will help revive a project that leadership wants to pull the plug on. If these kinds of things occur, all you can do is be an agreeable peacemaker and stay above the fray because it is not your fight to fight. What you can do is make sure that you have advocates on the client side and double down on what has been signed and agreed upon so that you are compensated for your work.

Cultural reception

Sometimes the world can dislike your hard work for a reason you did not intend. The recent We Love NY Campaign is a textbook example of a perfect cultural failure. Most designers hated it and thought it was a betrayal of Milton Glaser’s classic and beloved I Heart NY. This may be a valid feeling but it does not mean the work is not achieving its intended goal. A negative cultural reception to a brand often has little to do with how well it does the job it is intended to do. Work you may not like can still communicate effectively even if it does so in a visual or verbal way that you do not care for. Whenever brands evolve or change to criticize them for whatever reason is the easiest thing to do but the ire usually subsides.

As time passes, cultural perception also changes. What was once seen as a weird album from a famous artist can with time be seen as their finest work. So to with brands. We are as culturally critical as we are nostalgic and this results in the reinterpretation and remodeling of vernaculars to produce new things. If criticism erupts you just have to let it happen and move on to the next thing. Human beings these days only have the attention span of a Twitter feed so what might feel like impassioned critique now will fade and with this you can gain learnings for future projects.

Battle of egos

The ego is a powerful and dangerous weapon on the battlefield of creativity. When an ego is used for good, ambitious ideas can become reality. When an ego is used for evil, good people can get hurt and taken advantage of. In professional creative practice statements like “You are wrong. I am right, and mine is better” are counterproductive, isolate you, and will get the work nowhere.

High drama due to opinionated egos, be it on a Zoom call or in person, is often the result of a short fuse (often a leader not involved in the making) and does little but create undo tension and stress. Big ego eruptions need to be dealt with by the deciders on the project. Creative folks in the middle do not benefit from ego-driven drama because it is too diffuse to be actionable. You can’t effectively revise a design by yelling at someone. Being upset is fine but fighting to be right is not the purpose of any project.

More acute damage can result when your ego sneaks in making you uninterested in other ideas and to put your ideas first. To push back on an idea is completely fair but to ignore or dismiss ideas that are not yours or that you do not think are worth evaluating means you have become close minded and that is the worst kind of ego to have. Having a narrow view of what is possible and putting your version of what you think is right ahead of everyone else’s is not cool. I recall working with a large agency’s internal team where they hid assets from my team so that we had less to work with in hopes their work in the pitch would be more polished and be chosen. A totally dick move that did not work.

Revision spiral

A slow project death by what seems to be never ending revisions is something many of us are familiar with. The cause is most often indecision because project leaders are just not sure what the right thing is. On occasion a handful of creative alphas may spar for project supremacy by wanting to see many alternatives resulting in excessive rounds but this a more rare cause. The hardest thing to do in an excessive revision situation is to say the word “no” because no means “no more revisions” and if everyone has not agreed it means the project is not moving to completion. The solution is to shift the conversation from rounds of revisions to a more concrete conversation about what is needed to gain consensus to move forward.

A good way to unblock a revision spiral is to collect all of the design components that are working. More often than not revisions are the result of something specific like a typeface, a color, or a design move that is holding everything up. If you can isolate this offender and move it out of the larger project path it can be fussed with further without impacting everything else. One note on scoping. You may specify rounds of revisions contractually but if things are not gelling then pushing beyond the allotted revisions may be necessary. I try not to stop the flow and ask for more funds if revisions start to multiply. Pulling the money card is a mechanism that is at your disposal but should be called in as a last line of defense.

Communication breakdown

Have you ever been deep in a project and discovered there is no leader and that it seems like no one person, not even the client, knows the whole picture? This is what communication breakdown looks like. Projects can be like walking in the backcountry. Despite having a road map the team may get turned around, lose their way or have to double back. Misinterpretation due to partial knowledge or lack of sufficient context is usually the central cause of a break in communication clarity. The bigger a project gets the more divided that labor and next thing you know the left hand might not know what the right hand is doing.

The only solution to get back on track is to have a primary project sense-maker (1 or 2 people) that can be the translator and navigator for everyone else. This is usually not a project manager but more often the project owner, the primary strategist or the creative director because these kinds of folks have deep and shared project specific knowledge across disciplines. This allows them to be a kind of project interpreter. The sense-makers can provide the right amount of context for clients and teams and most importantly they can wield their knowledge and contextualization skills to propose clear and concrete solutions before they get passed to a larger group for consensus. This allows everyone to understand what each person’s role and responsibility is to get everyone back working together toward the same thing.

Rebranding the rebrand

When you deliver a brand system the goal is to have that system be implemented in such a way that internal client teams can learn it, use it and ultimately own it. As the brand gets road tested, it’s not uncommon for client teams to begin to make modifications to the system to better suit the realities for their day to day work. There can also be circumstances when previous ways of working (and seeing) begin to intercede into the new brand. Typefaces suddenly become all caps when they should not be. New colors appear. These changes can come about through a variety of reasons resulting in what the client ends up releasing out into the world looking very different from what you have delivered.

As an agency you want to put your best case study forward. When there is a disconnect from the ideal brand delivery and the modified brand reality you have to do everything in your power to celebrate the best version of the ideas regardless of what interpretations see the light of day. Exploration and trying new things is a natural outgrowth of the brand process and often the things that don’t make the cut are actually better than the final product. When the reality of the brand does not meet the case study ideal, frame it as exploration, prototyping, and pushing the edges of what is possible. These kinds of things are always a good story and the more out-there work is usually more interesting so try to bake it into the expectation of what the client will see from you.

Failure to launch

Have you ever delivered a project and had the client go dark? It does not happen often but occasionally your work might get mothballed and never see that light of day. The reason for this almost always has nothing to do with you or your team. Reworking every aspect of an organization’s visual and verbal identity, once delivered, will take work to get into practice and these efforts will often need to be done while normal day to day tasks continue at pace. This can drag things out or put a new brand on pause because the day to day work takes priority and is directly tied to what needs to get done today.

Rebranding requires that you redesign the proverbial car while you are driving it and unless everyone is committed, getting over the event horizon to a new way of behaving can stall out. The only way forward is to push through and to start using a new brand system to get the new parts on the road working for you. We can’t make a client work at the pace of implementation that we would prefer but we can certainly offer to lend a hand, to train teams and to shepherd the work from a system of rules to a functioning new machine for communicating.

Fail, grow, succeed, repeat

Failure can materialize in a myriad of ways in the creative process. All of them can be hard to identify and hard to negotiate but all of them are opportunities to learn, toughen, and grow. For me it comes down to the chemistry of the people involved, their civility and mutual respect for each other, the process, and the work. A recent intern asked me if there was one piece of guidance I could give them, what would it be? I said always be the most professional person in the room in everything you do. Every meeting, every email, every Slack, every design and file setup. Everything. Professionalism is the signature of respect and it is the thing that elevates everything you do to the greater goal you are working to achieve.

To negotiate failure in work and in life you have to rise above it and move forward with optimism because, like a stream, the currents of failure and success are always swirling together. By our nature people are self interested. We often lean into the things we have done before because they are comfortable. We tend to shy away from the unknown. We always want more time than we have to do something. In projects we crave certainty and a to-do list despite knowing in the back of our minds things will inevitably change. The remedy here is to embrace every change with an open and courageous mindset, to include others in the solution, and to know deeply that if failure comes it will be fleeting. This too shall pass.

Thanks for reading. If you are interested, check out my book A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity and the Business of Design.

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