Let's face it—design is riddled with counterintuitive truths.
Perhaps the most jarring: quality work isn't measured in aesthetic appeal, Behance likes, Dribbble hearts, design awards, or your boyfriend's enthusiastic thumbs-up.
Commercial design—our battlefield—is brutally pragmatic. The single metric that matters: Client satisfaction.
Full stop.
No need to regurgitate the countless design principles that populate every UX blog and Medium article. The practicing designer has seen them all before. Instead, these are the unglamorous truths that design schools conveniently omit—tactics that shield practitioners from the all-too-common professional pitfalls: stakeholder disconnects, creative frustration, and the soul-crushing absence of meaningful impact.
Rule 1: Know Your Client (KYC)
Even when hired for your signature aesthetic or typographic wizardry, the acceptance decision lives with the client. Before touching your first artboard:
- Map the decision hierarchy. Who holds final approval power. Decision by committee is a dangerous illusion—find the true decision-maker hiding behind delegated communications.
- Extract the real success metrics. "Make it pop" or "needs more wow factor" are red flags signaling the perilous road of endless revisions ahead.
- For business clients, decode their revenue model. The path to profit is rarely obvious. Connect with the P&L owners, not just the slide deck presenters.
- Audit available resources. Ensure your client possesses the technical stack, implementation bandwidth, and organizational willpower needed to execute your vision.
The deeper your client understanding, the clearer their actual needs become. Each insight increases your chances of delivering work that resonates precisely with their expectations—making approval almost inevitable.
Rule 2: Expectation Management
Your fundamental thesis: precision in requirements yields precision in deliverables. Normalize spending 30% of project bandwidth on discovery and requirement definition. This isn't overhead—it's insurance against the far costlier misalignment rework cycle.
Design is commonly perceived as a purely creative endeavor. Systematically dismantle this misconception. Remind everyone that you've gathered to solve a problem. Fonts, colors, and illustrations can always be adjusted—they rarely determine the true effectiveness of the final result.
Rule 3: Beauty Is Your Enemy
Beauty remains hopelessly subjective. Never assume aesthetic alignment between your sensibilities and client expectations. Industry standards often intentionally sacrifice beauty for function. Reference the Bloomberg Terminal—arguably the ugliest yet most profitable UI ever created. Solve for business outcomes first. Save your pixel-perfect obsessions and gradient tweaking for the final mile.
Rule 4: Iterate Relentlessly
Present strategic variations to clients. Multiple options increase your hit rate while demonstrating progress. This approach also creates openings to advance more daring solutions that satisfy your creative ambitions.
Never stop at the first idea—the breakthrough often comes at iteration seventeen.
Rule 5: Not Your War
Larger clients generate exponentially more opinions. While end-user feedback provides valuable signals, never forget whose interests you ultimately serve. You're a hired specialist in someone else's campaign. Your mission is clear: execute their objectives or find another banner to serve under. The battle belongs to your client; you're simply their strategic asset.
TLDR: Digital Rareism targets effectiveness as the only reliable foundation for growth, advancement, and success. Remember your role and purpose. Cut through the noise. Begin applying Rareism to yourself first—before attempting to reshape the world around you.
These principles may sound uninspiring and seem to clip a designer's wings, reducing creative flight to methodical, ground-level execution. But this is precisely where the paradox emerges.
By following these terrestrial mechanics, you construct the commercial runway needed for eventual takeoff. Effectiveness builds client success. Client success masters your reputation. Reputation creates demand. Demand grants you selection power. Selection power leads to passion projects. And passion projects? They're where your creative spirit finally soars without constraint.
Wasn't this your ultimate creative goal all along? This is the way. You might try to cut corners, but spoiler alert: you'll inevitably find yourself back on this path.