Design by committee is an approval process in which a team of people, (3 or more) gets to have their say in approving a design—essentially a full critique of the work as well as authority on suggesting design revisions.

While key stakeholder input from a variety of sources can be incredibly useful for informing the direction of a project, there’s a fine line between successfully balancing design feedback and letting the group lead the design direction from start to finish. When too many opinions enter the process, the original timeline and scope can be negatively affected. April’s blog post explores a few reasons why we prefer to avoid committee-led design.

Committee-led design is an invitation for a hodgepodge of opinions.

This can cause delays in productivity, increase the project cost as timelines extend or if additional changes are required beyond the original scope. Most designers include a limited number of revisions in their proposals, so endless revisions can drive up the cost if the client exceeds that limit.

Scope creep is one of the most common risks of committee-led design.

“Scope creep” can occur when too many voices are in the room. Clients and stakeholders add additional deliverables after the project execution has started (or before any of the original deliverables have been completed or even agreed upon by decision-makers.) These changes are often not properly reviewed, leaving an expectation for the design team to complete more tasks and deliverables with the same resources and within the same timeframe as the original scope.

The original concept can become diluted and obscured when everyone has equal say.

Merging everyone’s ideas into one graphic is never advised, especially as it relates to logo design. Logos are meant to quickly convey the face of your brand in a simple, scalable way. When a project extends for too long and stakeholders become impatient with the process, it creates a pressure to “settle” on a design. Everyone loses in this situation, including the design team. 

Committee-led design can lead to unnecessary confusion.

If processes, roles, and timelines aren’t clearly defined, efforts can overlap and become confusing to all parties involved. When client updates or feedback is conflicting, it can detract from the flow of work—this is especially true when multiple decision makers are involved. Ideally, they should connect internally, and provide a single round of concise feedback for the designer to move ahead with.

At PDC, we’re firm believers that you can maintain a sense of collaboration in the design process without the endless input from large focus groups or discovery teams with differing opinions. We’ve seen both successful and unsuccessful committee-led design. While it’s very important that we’re taking everyone’s opinions and feedback into account from the get-go (good design doesn’t happen in a vacuum!), these participants don’t necessarily need to be in every meeting throughout the entire design process. Here are a few tips:

Clearly outline your process from the start.

Good collaboration techniques, such as outlining your process, contracts, billing structure, and identifying the key objectives and existing problems that need to be addressed will set you up for success. Articulate when stakeholder input will be accepted, and when that time frame ends. Outline what will happen if additional deliverables are added to the project—are they completed after the original deliverables and time frame, or will you charge a rush fee and adhere to the original scope’s timeline?

Send your clients a project questionnaire.

We begin each project with a comprehensive questionnaire that takes a deep dive into our client’s business or organization. All project stakeholders have a chance to fill this discovery questionnaire out—allowing people to express as much as they’d like about their organization’s values, project goals, and more. With that being said, we highly encourage all project stakeholders to sit down as a group and fill out and submit one questionnaire. This may be the first time they are faced with these questions, so having one clear response from the group will only make the designer’s life easier and it often creates a sense of community and purpose for the clients. Once received, we distill the responses into clear problems, with actionable steps we can take to achieve the organization’s project goals.

The client should appoint a primary point of contact.

After the discovery phase, we strongly recommend that our bigger clients appoint a single member to be the primary point of contact. This contact receives our design work and notes, relays that information to their team of key stakeholders, collects feedback and resolves conflicting feedback internally before reconnecting with PDC. Otherwise, the design process can become complicated quickly—with more people involved in the process, differing opinions are much more likely.

Ideally, the decision maker should be a leader in the marketing or design department, but often will be the CEO of the company. In any case, this point person person should make the final say. In our experience, teams that have a point person have an easier time working together and are able to reach decisions more quickly.

Document the process.

Have you ever had a client go MIA for weeks at a time, even with check-ins? Sometimes that can’t be avoided. In addition to clearly outlining your process, it can be extremely useful to document project milestones and dates as they occur. Milestones might include: the date the client signed the project contract, when deliverables were handed off to the client and when feedback arrived, or how many days it’s been since you received a response. You also should consider adding a section to your contract with client obligations. If you have issues with unresponsive clients, (or even if you haven’t run into that), we recommend stating the number of calendar days granted to the client before the agreement and their deposit is terminated.

In summary, creatives should lead clients through the design process with their experience, expertise, and knowledge of the industry. More creative freedom usually leads to better efficiency, a more productive and successful relationship between designers and clients, as well as a stronger end result that the designer can truly be proud of.