Design’s secret weapon: creative empathy

Visual design is one of the least sacred disciplines to practice. No matter your level of talent, experience, training, or college degrees, clients and colleagues will have no qualms about critiquing your work and offering their own “art direction.”

If you take work personally, this can be annoying and painful like a slow death from a thousand cuts. The only way to manage this frustration is to be an effective negotiator of creative empathy. In this article I try to define creative empathy as it relates to brand and design and offer several scenarios and strategies that I have found useful when things become creatively challenging.

What is Creative Empathy exactly?

For me, creative empathy is the art and practice of embracing the objective and subjective thoughts and actions of a team to arrive at the best possible creative solution while instilling as much objectivity and shared ownership as possible.

The first thing we need to understand is that each one of us is living in our own idiosyncratic perception of the current moment. No matter how objective we think we are, we approach everything that we care out about with our own version of what is right and true.

In creative work, we are all seeing the problem through our own lens and our own version of reality. No one sees the world in the exact same way as everyone else. This results in creative disagreement, misunderstanding, and frustration.

“The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain. This is how it works. You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it.”

― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

Incremental vs. big picture thinking

As we get deeper into creative projects, our focus naturally turns to what we need to accomplish at this very moment based on what’s right in front of us. This could be things like researching and pulling reference, sketching, or playing with formal visual language. These more knowable and incremental tasks let us get into ‘headphone mode’ and a creative flow. To build a great design system, purely formal decisions and checking off procedural tasks that go into your day to day work have to interconnect and line up to create a cohesive story and build toward a larger whole that achieves the goal of the project in the minds of the client and team.

During the project process what is happening in your creative brain is a balancing act. As a designer, we are attempting to juggle creative ideas and procedural accuracy to keep the project on track while also evaluating abstract notions of beauty and aesthetics. All the while you have to be measuring what you are doing against business necessities and business goals from the mindset of the client so that they understand what you are after.

It is this juggling act that makes day-to-day design work extraordinarily daunting, and you can imagine that most of us fall back on the things we know well such as beauty and aesthetics over business goals and timelines. It is this matrix of big picture goals and day-to-day making that have to line up and reinforce each other for a project to be a success from the perspective of every party involved.

Walking in their shoes

Whether we would like to acknowledge it or not, in the creative services business we are all balancing some measure of partial success and partial failure. Rarely if ever do things turn out exactly as you would like them to. This push and pull between creative authorship and collective compromise is what keeps us moving forward in search of the next great idea.

Ideally, a great brand system is like a favorite pair of jeans. It fits great, reflects a business’s vision of itself and those that use it, and people feel a practical and emotional connection to it. Its usefulness and subjective connection to a business’s work and values makes you feel ownership and care for it. You would rather repair or upgrade it than discard it.

The biggest challenge is how do we get everyone to agree on a creative argument and a design solution when each person may have no grasp of your aesthetic or creative belief, of what makes sense in your head. The only way to do this is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and to deeply understand their perspective of what “success” means and to uncover how to operate within their neural vernacular so they can understand your way of thinking. It is very much like becoming an interpreter of different languages and customs, trying to communicate to each other while holding different values, systems, and priorities.

When it comes to creative Empathy the first thing I try to do is to understand and advocate for the thought process and needed outcomes for the primary decision-maker on the client side. If the primary decision-maker does not understand what you are after then everything else will fall apart. Regardless of the business goals of any project, the person who is accountable for its success will inevitably have an emotional stake in the project outcome. Whether they acknowledge it or not, it is their baby (and their story to tell leadership) and when we face success or failure, the buck stops with them.

You should ask yourself the question; “What is going to make the main decision-maker’s life easier?” What are the tools visually and verbally that they need to allow them to syndicate the final creative solution up the food chain to get everyone to advocate for the best idea and to compel everyone to join together to make it a reality? Successful creative empathy is ultimately about seeing through the eyes of every stakeholder on your team, the clients team, and all the people that are paying good money for a project to happen. This is the only way to get to the best answer for everyone involved.

Playing our part

Each person contributing to a project is a character in the story, and we have our own ideas about how we want this story to transpire and our responsibilities in a project’s success. Objectively, we all have a role assigned to us that we play — client, designer, creative technologist, strategist, project manager, and so on.

Through acts of creative empathy, we are working to validate each person’s role in the project story and its unfolding from phase to phase. We are also working to provide inputs and reinforcing feedback so that everyone feels they are driving the project story forward.

Not unlike eighth-grade summer camp, a best friend’s wedding, or a great game of soccer with friends, ideally what we are doing when we work on projects is we are participating in a collective ritual we all care about — the process. Through this process, we strive to feel connected to the work and each other by building a shared narrative where we are creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Each of us has to see ourselves in the work and to feel some degree of authorship. Everyone is contributing, and therefore a shared ownership and camaraderie ideally bubbles to the surface and each of us begins to feel fulfilled by the work and becomes driven to advocate for its collective success beyond our own individual validation or point of view.

So, the goal of creative empathy is not about watering down the work because we are trying to make each person feel good by giving everyone a say. Quite the opposite. Creative empathy is about finding that individual spark within each contributor and having those sparks compound with the collective whole to become a powerful catalyst to do amazing things.

Creative empathy at work

In the context of graphic design, a classic example of creative empathy in action is aligning on something foundational like typeface selection. Most clients do not realize that using a pedestrian or overused typeface can make any brand system feel generic and can also negatively impact the enthusiasm for creatives to actually use the system. No one likes using lame typefaces, and it makes everything else harder to do.

Designers are looking at typefaces through the lens of personality, contemporariness, and craft. We want to work with typography that feels fresh and interesting and in most cases we would prefer to work with typefaces that are new in the market and are expertly designed. A new, beautiful typeface that is well made can also be expensive, but its cost is a reflection of the care and quality put into it.

What some designers fail to realize is that many non-design savvy clients are not thinking about typography at all, and if they are they are evaluating it in terms of practicality. In the mind of some clients that may not understand or value the nuances of design, why would you change a typeface to something that is more expensive and no one associates with your brand? Better yet, why not use a free font?

So, here you have two agendas that are seeing typography in completely opposite perspectives yet also have the same project goal. How do you reconcile this? In my view, no amount of explanation around the personality or craft of a typeface will convince a client to believe it is right for their brand unless you and the client understand each other’s mindset and expectations and find common ground.

What the designer has to do is to get into the mindset of the client and to figure out how to connect the creative outcome you want (a better, radder typeface to design with) to the client’s goals (a better, more differentiating brand in the market that will make them more competitive and profitable.)

I would recommend that you do not lead with why the typeface you have selected is amazing. You might as well talk about how the Noah cardigan you decided to wear to the meeting is also amazing. What I am saying is that if you do not provide a rationale and business context for your decision then no one will understand it based on the realities of the project.

Start by explaining what their current brand suffers from and why it is not doing the job it needs to do to meet their business goals. Sharing qualitative evidence to back up your augment helps as well. Next, in a clear and succinct way explain and demonstrate the job that the brand is not doing and then build a narrative around why a new typeface is an important tool to help solve their problem.

This may sound straightforward, but it often is not. You must wield creative empathy to get on the same page, illuminate the problems that need to be solved, and then work through how your formal typographic and brand decisions will solve these problems. You have to do all this by having the world view of the client at the top of your mind so that their version of what is true is reinforced and they are nodding in agreement every step of the way.

Even after all of this, there is no guarantee a client will be persuaded. Aesthetics are subjective and that means there may be very little you can do to change a client’s mind. They may just hate the color green, or be color blind, or just have bad taste. Nonetheless, by using creative empathy to see the problem through their eyes and through their goals, you will at least get closer to a place of consensus that can move things forward and ideally mitigate subjective deadlocks.

Capturing the flag

Like creativity itself, there is no absolute aesthetic truth when building brands. Culture is ever evolving, and along with it our tastes and perceptions for what resonates and what doesn’t also change. This constant evolution is why hair metal was so big in the 80’s, why Apple thought Smurf colored iMacs were a really good idea in the 90’s and why we love emojis and TikTok today. We are always negotiating the rational and emotional perceptions of what feels right in the current moment to tell the right story that makes sense to us. At its core, creative empathy is about collectively making sense of the “Now” to create something that feels true, speaks to others, makes them care, think or open their wallet.

Commercial creativity is not a sacred art. There are often too many cooks in the kitchen, and we can feel exhausted and frustrated with the creative process as we struggle to create a great design or build a great brand while also making sure everyone on the project is heard and acknowledged.

When a project gets challenging, we can sometimes fall back on the endorphin rush that comes when we complain or defend our own creative ideas in an effort to make us feel right and validated. It’s human nature to want your version of what’s right to win the day. It’s less glamorous and far more difficult to be a mediator and a peacemaker through creative empathy, but in the long run we all need more calm and humility than friction when it comes to subjective decisions like creativity. Life is too short!

When it succeeds, the secret weapon that creative empathy can spark is that we become active participants in the creative journey together and generate a shared belief in the work without sacrificing the authenticity of our own point of view. This is how building a great story and “making magic” comes about.

Thanks for reading. For anyone interested in learning how humans are cognitively wired to create stories to reinforce our beliefs and to make sense of the world I highly recommend The Science of Storytelling by Will Stor. It’s an amazing book that is a great resource for any creative person that uses storytelling to express ideas and engage others.