Seth Godin has a really nice piece on how to "live happily" with a great designer. A good read for anyone who wants to understand what makes the creative process work, and for the designer, some language to surround what it is exactly that's bugging you.

This of course assumes that the designer is "great." My favorite:

You can't tell me you'll know it when you see it. First, you won't. Second, it wastes too much time. Instead, you'll need to have the patience to invest twenty minutes in accurately describing the strategy. That means you need to be abstract (what is this work trying to accomplish) resistant to pleasing everyone (it needs to do this, this and that) and willing, if the work meets your strategic goal, to embrace it even if it's not to your taste.

I've run into this problem so many times. Clarity of concept is something clients are often too lazy to do, and they end up muddling the process, which produces results that are nowhere near what they should be. And, the designer is not a mindreader, nor does he have a crystal ball either.

Tags: graphic+design, designers, creative+process