Why feedback should focus on the brief, not taste
Launch library · evergreen read
Personal taste is the easiest and least useful lens for giving creative feedback, because it offers an opinion without a shared standard to test it against. Feedback anchored in the brief instead asks whether the work achieves what it set out to achieve, a question everyone in the room can actually assess together.
Taste based feedback tends to send creative work in circles, since each new reviewer's preferences can contradict the last, with no objective way to resolve the disagreement. Brief based feedback gives the work somewhere stable to be measured against, regardless of how many people weigh in along the way.
This does not eliminate subjectivity from the process entirely, since judging whether work meets a brief still involves interpretation. But it replaces an argument about personal preference with an argument about evidence and intent, which is a far more productive conversation for a creative team to be having.