Taste is not a brief

The sentence sounds like the end of a conversation, but it often means the vocabulary to continue is missing. The person may have sensed a real distance from the project: the tone feels too cold, the rhythm suggests haste or the type moves the brand towards an unexpected audience. While that distance is compressed into personal taste, the team can neither evaluate nor correct it.

The least useful response is to defend the proposal immediately. It turns a confused reaction into a contest of expertise. Ask where the discomfort sits, how it changes the perception of the project and which consequence is worrying. Taste does not disappear; it becomes observable material.

An objective describes what the project must achieve. A criterion lets the team compare options. Taste is a personal response to form. The three may converge, but they are not interchangeable. “We want to feel contemporary” is too vague; “we need to be recognisable in a crowded feed without losing authority” creates a useful tension.

When a preference appears, connect it to one of the agreed criteria. If the connection holds, the feedback concerns the project. If it does not, it can remain a preference worth considering without automatically gaining the power to decide. This protects both client and studio: nobody has to pretend choices are objective, but they are not treated as equivalent votes either.

References become dangerous when everyone reads them differently. One person sees colour, another irony, a third the prestige of the brand that used them. If a brief collects images without commentary, the project inherits an apparent agreement that will collapse with the first proposal.

For every reference, write what is relevant and what is not. “We want this density, not the aggressive tone”; “we need this navigational clarity, not its minimalist look”. The exercise feels overly careful only until it prevents weeks of revisions. More importantly, it gives the studio room to interpret rather than copy.

More people can improve a project when each brings different information. It becomes destructive when everyone edits the same formal layer and the proposal is corrected by addition: a colour from one route, a typeface from another, the tone from a third. Compromise reduces conflict but often removes the logic that made each direction coherent.

Responsibility needs to be explicit. The group can test objectives, risks and adoption; one person or a small core must synthesise feedback and decide. This is not an aesthetic privilege. It prevents the project from answering incompatible requests simultaneously without acknowledging the contradiction.

The most common words in creative briefs — simple, premium, bold, human, innovative — feel precise only because they are familiar. Always ask what would change if that quality were present. “Human” might mean conversational language, unpolished photography, accessible support or small signs of imperfection. Those are very different choices.

A useful vocabulary contains tensions and boundaries: direct but not abrupt, informed without feeling academic, energetic without becoming childish. It should not describe the solution in advance; it should make wrong routes recognisable. When proposals arrive, the team can discuss their distance from those boundaries instead of seeking abstract agreement about beauty.

A studio must be able to challenge feedback that breaks the system, but the refusal is useful only when it reveals the cost of the change. Instead of “it does not work graphically”, explain that reducing the contrast weakens hierarchy on mobile, or that adding a fourth tone makes two levels of voice indistinguishable.

Clients can also say no productively: not by requesting another generic variant, but by naming the unmet criterion and what cannot be sacrificed. Both sides stop protecting their authority and return to protecting the project.

Turning taste into criteria does not mean freezing everything at the start. Proposals may reveal that a priority was false or that two objectives cannot coexist. The brief should be allowed to change, but each change must be named: what was learned, which criterion is being updated and which consequence the team accepts.

That record prevents revisions from feeling arbitrary and makes a strong deviation easier to recognise. The project is not trying to remove subjectivity. It is giving subjectivity enough structure to produce decisions rather than reactions.