You've just finished a piece of work you're proud of. You share it on socials, and within minutes the opinions start rolling in. Some positive, some negative, and some somewhere in the middle.

If you're a designer who posts work online, this probably sounds familiar. And the truth is it will always be like this, because the very essence of design and creativity is innately subjective. But what you can do, is learn to approach it to your advantage.

What is subjectivity in design?

Subjectivity is simply what happens when personal taste and lived experience shape how someone reacts to a piece of work. It's human, and a beautiful component of human creativity.

The problem isn't that people have opinions. The problem is when those opinions get treated as objective critique. When "I don't like it" carries the same weight as "this doesn't achieve what it set out to do." Those are completely different statements, and mixing them up is where things go wrong.

An interesting distinction to think about here is between taste and judgement. Taste is about the viewer. Judgment is about the work.

Taste is personal. It's shaped by everything you've experienced, what you've been exposed to, what you find beautiful or jarring. It shifts over time and varies wildly between people.

Judgment is different. It asks: what is this work trying to achieve? Who is it for? Does it do the job? Good judgment is anchored in intent, audience and context. Not in whether something matches your personal aesthetic.

While your personal taste is valuable, in most cases, when giving feedback, judgement should be prioritised. It's specific, grounded, and gives a designer something to actually work with.

The comment section

Social media has changed this conversation in ways we're all still getting our heads around. Every piece of work published online now lives inside an open forum where anyone can weigh in at any time. The sheer volume of design being shared every day is, on balance, a good thing. It raises the bar and democratises inspiration. But it also means the audience for any piece of work is now essentially unlimited, and an unlimited audience will never agree.

A rebrand that delights half the internet will horrify the other half. A logo that wins awards will still get torn apart on X. That's not necessarily a sign the work failed. That's just the world we're operating in now, and ultimately the lack of consensus isn't a bad thing. If anything, it means you did your job correctly, making the work specific enough to hit the spot for the people you intended it to.

What good feedback actually looks like

Take the recent Lacoste rebrand by Commission Studio. The moment any heritage brand updates its identity, the responses split instantly. Some people love the new serif, some prefer the old. Both reactions are personal and subjective, which makes them difficult to use for the designers behind the work.

Non-subjective feedback looks more like this: does the updated identity still speak to the brand's core audience? Does the new logotype retain enough equity from the original? Does it work across all the applications it needs to?

These are questions grounded in what the rebrand was actually trying to do. They might reach the same conclusion, but they get there through reasoning rather than preference. That's the difference between feedback that moves things forward and feedback that just adds noise.

Getting comfortable with subjectivity is a superpower

Subjectivity in design is never going away. The designers who thrive are the ones who stop fighting that and start making peace with it.

When you design to please everyone, you're chasing something that doesn't exist. Someone will always have a different opinion, a different reference point, a different gut reaction. That anxiety, when it sits at the centre of your work, produces watered down output. The kind that offends no one and moves no one either.

When you design with clarity of intent, knowing who the work is for, what it needs to do, and why you made the calls you made, you develop true craft.

One last thing

Subjectivity in design is a condition we all need to understand. The work will always mean different things to different people. That's not a flaw, it's just what happens when you make something and put it into the world.

What you can control is how you engage with it. Ground your decisions in purpose. Learn the difference between taste and judgment. And get comfortable asking what feedback is actually anchored to before you act on it.

Not everyone will get it, but the right people will.

Shot of the good stuff.