If Nobody Hates It, Is It Worth Remembering?
Somewhere, right now, a brilliant piece of design is being ruined by the words: ‘Can we make it a bit safer?’
You know what happens next.
The colour gets toned down.
The idea gets softened.
The interesting bit gets removed.
Everyone around the table slowly starts nodding.
And eventually, after enough rounds of feedback, you arrive at something nobody hates.
Which sounds like a win.
Until you realise nobody loves it either.
And that might be the bigger problem.
You’re not supposed to like everything
Look around your living room.
Then look at somebody else’s.
Different sofa. Different artwork. Different colours. Different taste.
Open your wardrobe and compare it with your mate’s.
There’s a reason we don’t all dress the same, drive the same cars, drink the same beer or decorate our houses like one enormous global show home.
We like different things.
So why do we sometimes expect design to somehow escape that?
The idea that you can create something everyone loves is a lovely ambition.
It’s also complete nonsense.
If everyone has different tastes, then surely strong design should create different reactions too.
Somebody should love it.
Somebody else might hate it.
That doesn’t automatically mean either of them is wrong.
“Can you make it a bit safer?”
Every designer has had this one.
You present something you genuinely believe is the right answer.
There’s a strong idea behind it.
It looks different.
It feels distinctive.
Then the feedback starts.
Could that be smaller?
Could this be a little less bold?
Can we make that more like the competitor?
Could we try the logo over here?
What if the blue was slightly more… blue?
And to be fair, that’s part of the job.
You’re designing for a client, not hanging your personal artwork in the Louvre.
The person paying you has their own tastes, their own preferences and their own idea of what their business should look like.
You can explain your thinking.
You can make the case.
You can show why you believe one direction is stronger than another.
But if someone has already decided what they want, there’s only so far you can push.
Sometimes the design gets better through feedback.
Sometimes you slowly watch all the interesting bits being removed until everyone in the room agrees it’s…
quite nice.
The two most dangerous words in design.
Quite nice is where ideas go to die
I’d much rather make something 30% of people love and 30% hate than something 100% of people describe as quite nice.
Because nobody tells their friends about “quite nice”.
Nobody remembers the perfectly acceptable advert.
Nobody stops scrolling because the layout successfully avoided offending them.
Safe design can absolutely be polished.
It can be beautifully on brand.
It can use the correct fonts, the correct colours, the correct spacing and follow every guideline perfectly.
And still do absolutely nothing.
It becomes noise.
It exists.
Then it disappears.
The memorable stuff usually took a risk
Think about the Cadbury Gorilla advert.
A bloke in a gorilla suit sits behind a drum kit and eventually starts hammering along to Phil Collins.
Hardly the most obvious way to sell chocolate.
The product barely appears until the end.
Yet the advert became iconic.
It didn’t explain the cocoa percentage.
It didn’t show somebody taking a luxurious bite while a voiceover whispered about smoothness.
It made people feel something.
And, more importantly, it made people remember it.
Apple has done the same sort of thing repeatedly.
Its famous Think Different campaign wasn’t really about processor speeds or technical specifications. It positioned Apple around a belief and a type of person instead.
The best advertising often doesn’t scream:
HERE IS THE PRODUCT. PLEASE BUY THE PRODUCT.
It gives you something to think about.
AI has a safe-design problem too
AI can make incredibly polished work incredibly quickly.
That’s useful.
But I think it’s also drifting towards a problem.
A lot of AI-generated design feels technically competent but creatively familiar.
Perfect lighting.
Perfect composition.
Perfect type.
Perfect little trendy gradients.
And somehow you’ve seen it 400 times already.
That’s what happens when the goal becomes generating something that looks “good” rather than finding an idea that feels specific.
Safe design has always existed.
AI just lets us produce much more of it, much faster.
Which is possibly not the productivity breakthrough we were hoping for.
Then there’s Garage Project
Garage Project is a brilliant example of a brand that doesn’t seem remotely interested in making every product look identical.
Different beers can have completely different artwork.
Different illustrators.
Different visual styles.
Some cans are bright.
Some are weird.
Some are beautiful.
Some are probably going to make somebody stand in front of the fridge and think:
“What on earth is that?”
Perfect.
That could sound like branding chaos.
Yet somehow it still feels like Garage Project.
Maybe the consistency isn’t in making every can look the same.
Maybe the consistency is in the attitude.
Experimental beer.
Experimental artwork.
Different every time.
That feels a lot stronger to me than forcing everything through exactly the same template because page 47 of the brand guidelines says so.
There’s a reason there are hundreds of beers
Imagine telling a brewery:
“We need to make one beer that everybody likes.”
Good luck.
Somebody loves a massive hazy IPA.
Someone else thinks it tastes like a Christmas tree.
Somebody wants a sour.
Somebody wants a lager.
Somebody is standing in the corner drinking something that tastes faintly of smoked bacon and insisting you should try it.
That’s personal preference.
Design isn’t completely different.
You shouldn’t expect everyone to react to it in the same way.
And trying to force that reaction can remove the very thing that made the idea interesting in the first place.
Of course, hated doesn’t automatically mean good
There is an important distinction here.
If everybody hates your design, you can’t just lean back confidently and announce:
“Excellent. It’s provocative.”
Sometimes something is hated because it’s brave.
Sometimes it’s hated because it’s terrible.
That’s where the thinking matters.
Is there an idea behind it?
Does it make sense for the audience?
Does it feel right for the brand?
Is there a reason for the choices?
Being different purely for the sake of being different isn’t creativity.
It’s just wearing a lampshade to Tesco.
The point isn’t to deliberately annoy people.
The point is to stop being terrified that somebody might not like it.
I don’t want everybody to like it
If a client ever said to me:
“I need everyone to like this.”
My answer would be pretty simple.
They won’t.
And that’s fine.
Because somebody else probably loves exactly the thing they hate.
That’s why we have different clothes.
Different furniture.
Different music.
Different cars.
Different beers.
And different brands.
The goal shouldn’t be universal approval.
The goal should be creating something that feels right, means something and sticks in somebody’s head.
Because the safest work in the room might get the fewest complaints.
But it probably gets the fewest conversations too.
And personally, I’d rather make something worth talking about.
Even if somebody absolutely hates it.