Most design reviews start with a question about taste: do we like it? It is the least useful question you can ask. Taste changes from person to person and from season to season. The work has to survive long after the meeting is over.
So before anything leaves the studio, I put it through three tests. None of them asks whether it is beautiful.
1. Is it respectful?
Respect starts with the people who will live with the design: the customer who picks up the package, the staff who stack it on a shelf, the owner who has to explain it to their team. A respectful design does not shout to cover a weak idea, and it does not borrow cultural symbols it does not understand.
Respect is also about the brand's own history. A redesign that erases everything a business has built is rarely the bravest option. More often it is the laziest.
2. Is it usable?
A logo that falls apart at small sizes, a label nobody can read across a counter, a colour system that only works on a screen: these are not style choices, they are failures of use.
Usable design is tested in the real world: printed, folded, photographed under bad light, held in one hand while the other holds a phone. If it only works in the presentation file, it does not work.
3. Is it aware of its context?
Every project enters a real place — a street, a shelf, a feed, a culture. The same mark can feel premium in one market and cold in another. Context-aware design starts by looking at what surrounds the work before deciding what the work should be.
This is why I spend more time on research and reference than on the first sketch. The answer is usually already in the context; the job is to notice it.
What about beauty?
Beauty matters. It is how people decide, in a second, whether to trust something. But when a design passes the three tests above, beauty tends to follow — because what is respectful, usable and well-placed already feels right.
When it does not, no amount of polish will save it.