Most design projects that go wrong do so before anyone opens a design tool. The brief was vague on scope, the client had an implicit definition of success that was never written down, and the team started executing before anyone had agreed on what the deliverable actually was. A few weeks in, the misalignment becomes impossible to ignore. At that point, recovering takes more energy than the work itself would have required.
I have been on both sides of this. Early in my practice, I absorbed scope ambiguity as a normal cost of working with clients. I would resolve it through iteration: show work early, adjust based on feedback, refine toward something that felt right. That works, but it is slow, and it transfers the cost of unclear thinking onto the production phase, where it is most expensive to absorb.
