Why everybody gets to have an opinion

A month ago I found myself briefing a book cover designer — skilled, accomplished, with a formidable portfolio born of thirty years of practice. I knew what the book was about. I knew what I wanted it to feel like. I had some half-formed thoughts on the aesthetic I wanted the cover to convey.

I opened my mouth and started mumbling. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a precipice — wanting to speak, but hearing my own words in advance and pre-judging them as uninformed, naive, the kind of thing that makes an expert wince politely before steering the conversation toward something more manageable. I apologised. Said something about feeling silly. Something about not wanting to overstep.

He laughed and said: “Martin, cover design is like pop music. It’s not that deep. Everybody gets to have an opinion.”

Fuck me, what a relief that was. What an invitation. We talked about what we each loved (and hated) and why. I sent him an email full of covers I’d admired for years — work I might otherwise not have shared because it felt too directive, too personal, too revealing of whatever odd aesthetic obsessions I’d accumulated. It was one of the best briefing conversations I’ve had. And almost didn’t happen.

I’ve been thinking about that precipice ever since. I’ve been standing on the other side of it for a long time. The client starts a sentence, loses confidence halfway through, and the practitioner efficiently finishes it for them with something more usable. Or the client mentions a reference, or a peeve, or a prejudice, and the expert’s expression does something subtle and dismissive. Or the room just moves on, as rooms do, and the thought that cost the client something to form never quite makes it out of their mouth.

We — practitioners, experts, credentialled holders of the domain knowledge we unhelpfully label ‘creativity’ — give almost no thought to what that moment costs. We are so occupied by our own expertise that we have forgotten what it takes for someone to walk into the room and offer an idea they’re not sure will be welcome or entertained.  

None of this is to say the designer’s taste didn’t matter. Of course it did. Taste isn’t mere preference. It is cultural competence, built through decades of deliberate, sustained engagement with a field — its history, its failures, its best work.

But here is what I had that he didn’t. I knew what I wanted this book to try and do in the world. I knew which visual languages my intended audience — trained by years of category convention — had come to associate with airport-bookshop thought leadership. I knew I wanted it to be a personal expression of my identity. That knowledge wasn’t aesthetic. But it was not nothing.

The problem with expertise — any expertise — is that the practitioner gets very good at reading the codes of their own discipline and progressively less good at registering information that doesn’t arrive in that code. The client's stumbling, hesitant, sometimes apologetic, sometimes more forceful half-opinion isn't legible as information. It doesn't arrive in the right format, so it gets translated, smoothed. Or worse it gets dismissed as creative backseat driving, forgetting that agencies were never designed to be sovereign actors. Michelangelo worked to carry someone else's intentions into the world with skill and devotion. So did Wren. So did every architect, designer, and maker who ever took a commission.

Clients of course, arrive with their own distortions. Prejudice disguised as instinct. Category convention mistaken for timeless truth. Inherited best practice (“where’s the bite and smile moment?”) confused for holy writ. The phrase “consumers in [insert country] won’t get it” — deployed with uninterrogated certainty, so rarely tested against actual evidence. The client’s position is not pristine. Neither party enters the room unblemished by bias and history. The practitioner carries the monoculture of their discipline. The client carries the scar tissue of their organisation. The question is not whose distortions are worse. The question is whether anyone in the room has the skill to work through both.

The good creative — the genuinely good one — does. They don’t just tolerate the client’s position. They listen for the intent underneath it. “I don’t want it to feel too corporate” isn’t a creative direction. But it is information. It’s telling you something about what the brand has spent years becoming, something about what the client is afraid of, something about what the audience has been trained to expect. The good creative hears all of that and knows what to do with it.

This is not the same as compliance. It is not giving the client what they asked for. It is understanding what they were reaching for when they asked for it — and why. Other disciplines have formalised this distinction. The UK’s Royal Marines, when given a mission, begin by asking a single question - do we understand the commander’s intent? The superior’s orders will not detail how a unit achieves its objective — that is left to subordinate commanders to determine. But they must understand what the mission is actually trying to accomplish before they can decide how. The brief is not the destination. The brief is an articulation of intent. The job is to serve the intent, not transcribe the instructions.

What the designer gave me, with that one line, was not permission to have taste. I don’t have his taste. What he gave me was permission to have a position. Position is not taste. It is what you bring to a specific problem in a specific room on a specific day, built from everything you know about the organisation, the audience, the history, and what is actually at stake. The designer is the custodian of taste. The client is the custodian of the position. Both are required. The briefing room is precisely the place where they are supposed to meet.

What we too often create is an environment in which only one kind of knowledge is permitted to speak. The client who encounters the resistance of the expert is robbed of their voice. The client who arrives with strong opinions gets a different problem - their position mistaken for constraint, their conviction read as difficulty. Either way, what they carry walks back out with them. And the work is poorer for it.

Creativity is like pop music.

It is meant to be felt and understood on first contact. The craft that makes it work may not be visible or intelligible to the non-expert — but we are not asking anyone to decode Joyce’s Ulysses. The response of an ordinary reader is not noise to be filtered out.

Everybody gets to have an opinion.

My former chief creative officers at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam used to say it directly, about the work: “You do not have the right not to have an opinion.” They weren’t talking about taste. They were talking about responsibility. If the work goes out into the world and does something — to people, to a brand, to a culture — then everyone in the room owns a share of that. And gets to have an opinion.

***

Thank you, Jamie Keenan, for making the precipice smaller.