Say you go to a restaurant and taste a new food and you hate it. Maybe you even gag a little or spit it into a napkin. Then you turn to your dining companion and say, "Here ... taste this."
Nine times out of 10 your friend will look at you like you're nuts. If you hate it , she'll hate it ... or so goes the logic. But we all KNOW that everyone has different tastes, and one man's beetle dung is another's delicacy.
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| Photo by Jim Bender. Click to enlarge. |
The same holds true for creative. We all have different tastes, but for some reason we expect that everyone's reaction to a certain piece will be similar to ours. Case in point. The photo to the left is a recent shot of my son. It's slightly desaturated, with a higher level of desaturation in the red channel than the others. I like it. It pushes the photo ever so slightly out of the range of realism and makes it feel a bit more dreamy. (And who doesn't think their kids are dreamy, right?)
Apparently not my wife. Now, before she reads this and threatens fast and certain retribution, I have to say that she absolutely adores our son with all of her heart. She just doesn't like the photo. The only word that came to her mind when she saw it was "weird." She prefers the version straight from the camera, which renders his strawberry blond hair and his rosey cheeks more accurately.
Issues such as color palettes or color intensity are often simple aesthetic disagreements, the likes of which play over and over again in creative departments throughout the land. Yes, there are reams of perspectives on color theory and all that jazz, but when it comes down to it, we're usually talking about taste. Dung vs. delicacy. Solve the issue quickly and move on to the main course. Does the work as a whole communicate the message? If not, you've got bigger issues to tackle than matters of taste.



