If you’d like to save yourself some angst with future clients, please read further.  Picture if you would, a good lead.  Everything seems just peachy keen, potential client contacts you because they ‘saw some of your work’ or were referred to you by another one of your clients - and they may even mention that you do ‘really good work’.  There is one very simple thing that you need to know when taking on a project, and that is, ’What will your (the service provider) job be, and what does the client really want from you.’

Taking off from another post regarding where the creative direction falls on the project, this post focuses specifically on those clients who may be saying one thing but are really asking for another.  I do understand that design (for the most part) can be very subjective.  One person can look at a project and not like it, the next person loves it.  But my goal here is to expose those clients that will walk in your door, tell you how much they appreciate your style and work - how good you are at what you do..blah blah, and then when you start creating ideas and designing comps, they pay absolutely NO MIND to what you are sending over and instead assume the lead creative role and, well… ruin the project.  I’m sure there are exceptions to this scenario, but not many of them.

To clarify my position, I understand that in our industry our job is to provide a service to the client.  I also understand that we don’t always catch the right ‘vibe’ that the client is trying to convey to their audience.  In addition, I also understand that the client may have a good concept of the theme or style they are after (though let me know if you run into any).  Furthermore, sometimes we have brain-farts and our work certainly isn’t always FWA worthy, but you must pay careful attention to clients that have NO INTENTION OF USING YOUR OR YOUR TEAM’S CREATIVE SKILLS.  They will simply turn you (and your staff) into a production team.  Now, if you know this going in - this is fine.  I have absolutely NO PROBLEM with a client coming to us saying, ‘Hey look, we need someone to implement our ideas.  You may not like the direction we’re going, and we’re not very good at design, but this is what’s been decided.  Are you able to produce this site for us based on the designs we’ll be sending over to you?’.  This is how the client should approach this scenario but unfortunately the communication isn’t packaged this way.  At this point, you now have a decision to either point them to Craigslist to get someone to do the production work, or if you have the resources and are ok with it, by all means.


The moral of the story is to simply know and understand what your being hired for.  Clients don’t like surprises but we don’t like them either
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SP