Subjectivity—a skilled designer’s subjectivity—has an important role to play in excellent design. Our subjective perception differs from that of other people in many ways and we must guard against forces that can corrupt it. In many respects, our clients seek and pay for our special ability to just know some things intuitively, and if we treat our gifts and perceptions and processes lightly we invite corruption. If we do this, we would fail our clients and lose our unique value as professionals.

It is … necessary for you to form habits and invoke processes that help to displace the practice of holding too tightly to ideas and concepts in your work. True, it may sometimes seem best to allow rationalization to alleviate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance in your design work. But that discomfort is mild as compared to the agony you will know when the design you’re about to show, or that the client has approved, has no foundation beyond «I really like it.»

Andy Rutledge.