Designers, how do I keep clients in line?

This is what minutes are for.

This is an ongoing problem with every client, regardless of who "signs off" on what. Eventually, Decision-Maker appears and says, "No no, it's all wrong!"

This is where marketing or sales appear and argue with DM over who pays. If they pay it's not a problem.

Thermo OTM, twice.

solution: make the decision maker sign off stuff before you do anything?

If you have a problem with them changing things after they sign off - charge more - add a revision fee. If they are doing this you will want to make extra sure you have hard copy of their approval on whatever does eventually go out; incase they change their minds way too late and try to pin it on you.

Client destroying your beautiful design? Well, all you can do is try to reason with them. If you have a clear idea of why your concept would look better you'll have to find a way to make them understand. Good luck!

as soon as you have any project where the CEO has input (and isn't an actual real editor), then yr fucked

If you figure something out, let me know.

(*= one esp. who wd do rough and sloppy lay-outs of complicated tables and leave it to the subs and the computer ppl to "tidy it up" - in no time flat - and get mad when the thing she wanted looked horrible once "tidied up")

I just searched "Derren Brown" on Amazon and all that came up were MINDREADING BOOKS! If this is what you were referring to, then ha ha that was a good one. If there is another Derren Brown who wrote a manual on designer-client relations, please name the book. Thanks!

designers sometimes aren't good with client interaction and can be passive-agressive or adverserial. most people are self-absorbed and don't really get what you do or what's expected of them, they just focus on what they want. so you have to make it all really clear. i usually make up a contract in the beginning saying here's what's happening THIS is what you're getting for THIS much money THIS is the process, if anything has to change, you have to pay. and i find the less you charge the shittier they treat you, but that arrangement has a cutoff, cuz after a certain amount they figure they own you outright.

This is very difficult for me. It's salesmanship, basically, and I ain't got it. I wish there was some way to say to a client, "Just trust me," but there isn't, so instead I say, "Haha, ok, that sounds like... it might... work... ok, I'll see what I can do with that terrible idea... oh, yes, I'm sure everyone loves dead-unfunny puns, I'll be sure to work that in... yellow? Oh, yes, the best color for almost everything..." And so forth.

Like Walter says, sometimes you can still make it work. Sometimes you can't. How do you get around the problem of designing things that make your client perfectly happy, but horrify you and are unsuitable for any portfolio?

But, these are recurring problems everywhere I've ever worked, regardless of who is responsible for the project planning.

ha ha xpost WE HATES TEH YELLOW!

Always.

And it becomes a face-off.

But there is! I mean, personally I don't have it which is why I work for someone else. I've seen it happen though!

Anyone who goes from laughing in English to laughing in Swedish is obviously not trustworthy.

can anybody else remember the days of clients demanding blinking text and rotating/flashing/swirling/exploding "NEW!!" buttons or "EMAIL" icons? yeesh.

also, i agree with the sentiment that after a statement of work is signed, any changes from the client result in a fee for re-evaluation of time/money/deadline requirements and no new work is done until they realize that not only is this gonna cost them EVEN MORE, but that they're wasting time just by asking. that needs to be part of your contract. they wanna dick around because the right person didn't make the decision in the first place, they can pay for your inconvience.

of course, it's easy for me to say that, but another to see it happen like that... cause so often it's pretty much impossible to have a contract situation flow like that.

depending on the size of the contract, you can sometimes spook people with heavily legalistic bizness. i guess it depends on how much work you've got.
m.

Totally, completely OTM.

Oh, I know that one. Or the one who gives you criticism like, "It doesn't POP! Make it POP!" And I'm like, the photograph you sent me is of a middle-aged man sitting in a lawn chair. I'm not a fucking alchemist.

What really gets me is having to explain the basics of everything to everyone, every time. Or wanting to, and then deciding it's not worth the effort. You cannot, for instance, explain why the layout and color scheme they picked is not going to be the one that finally disproves the four-color theorem, because they have never heard of the four-color theorem and don't give a fig. Also tricky: explaining how your design creates a natural motion on the page, whereas what they are asking for is for you to make stacked boxes exciting without using any whitespace or varying sizes of any elements. They do not understand that you're not pulling this out of your ass, and it's a waste of time to try to explain it to them.

So, yes, not artist, craftsman. But there is a craft to it, and often the client asks you to forget everything you know to be true and correct about the arrangement of visual elements and color schemes and fonts and what have you, and make something that's just plain bad. And you do it, and you get paid, but you feel defeated. You feel like you're not allowed to do your job, and that's fucking frustrating.

Actually, I take this back. It may well not be a waste of time. I wouldn't know, because I don't have the backbone to argue with someone about what's going in their ad or publication. I always imagine that the next thing they'll say is, "Don't tell ME my business!"

This is very true and a commonly voiced aphorism among the places I've worked.

And clients create the biggest problems for themselves by assuming they can make simple changes themselves later on.Would anyone ever say to a carpenter, "Oh just put a room over there and I can always change it later"?

Check out my realtime 3D Java interface though - it's well bum.

plus a lot of them didn't know html.

Don't know what you design, but I know from the point of view of someone who occasionally commisions websites that not being ugly is often not the most important thing.
Being legible, well laid out and easy to use are a LOT more important!

True for any job. But that seems to be what working for someone else is all about. It's business. Getting Paid -vs- Professional Integrity. If you get your way 10% of the time, consider yourself really lucky.

blame the client for not hiring a programmer in addition!

Now before you say, "Why Flash? It's your own fault!" I will just tell you that they originally came to us with flash examples, asking for flash, etc. The concept is this whole lame "drawing back of a red curtain" thing that needs Flash to work and the content pages are on a lower level flash movie.

However, since everything is now supposed to be SEPIA, the entire "red curtain" lame idea is pointless BECAUSE IT WILL BE SEPIA!

It went from being 100% complete template and 80% complete content to 0% complete.

the designer would mock something up using whatever he liked to use and would then just run some kind of image cutter tool on it and send us the html that spat out. you'd end up with 17 column tables, some of the columns only 3 pixels wide, just so some superfluous rollover images appeared on a curve (same bloke obviously didn't bother checking his designs looked ok on anything other than a mac...).

the next guy (maybe the same guy) did something very similar - made a design which had 3 distinct horizontal panels but the html he sent had a single table with all the required columns running through it so, again, you had lots of teensy columns and lots of colspan nonsense. would've saved us both a lot of work if he'd just sent us the button images and a sketch rather than html.

b-b-b-but I would LOVE to have a better (pardon me, ANY) understanding of basic design and I would LOVE it if a designer would help me (an editor who works on both web and traditional publications)develop basic design skills!

My problem is that I'm in a situation where the (questionably competent) desktop publisher I work with is also the person who comes up with design comps. She's not a designer by training at all, and I'm constantly in the position of thinking "this looks AWFUL and does not work AT ALL" but not having any of the skills to craft it into something good.

SO SO SO will someone pleeeeeeeease recommend a good basic design textbook or tell me if I should take some sort of community college course and if so what the hell kind of class would that be??? I really don't want to be the kind of DM you complain about but I HAVE NO TOOLS HERE PEOPLE!!! I would hire a real designer if I could but YOU PEOPLE ARE EXPENSIVE.

SO TRUE!

This is something approaching an efficient system, but I'd skip the step where he sends you the HTML tht Photoshop generates (I just know that's what it is). I would mind working on a "you design it, I'll code it" basis. Have the designer send you his mockups, maybe some Flash, maybe dictate some link colors or what have you, and then code it properly from the get-go using CSS and nice clean HTML. It's not a bad system. There's not going to be a lot that a designer has come up with that's not going to be possible in html.

the designer would mock something up using whatever he liked to use and would then just run some kind of image cutter tool on it and send us the html that spat out. you'd end up with 17 column tables, some of the columns only 3 pixels wide, just so some superfluous rollover images appeared on a curve (same bloke obviously didn't bother checking his designs looked ok on anything other than a mac...).

where I used to work it was common practice for the designers, of which I was one, to create layouts in photoshop with guides which the coders would have to slice up in Fireworks themselves! by early 2001 the designers did the slicing but the coders still had to deal with generated tiny columns and whatnot. we knew it was wrong but that's the way it was done for a while.

haha "coders"

and we didn't have access to the designers, no phone number, no email, nothing. i guess one of the managers must've but they were as clueless as the designer 8)

-- mei (meirion.lewi...) (webmail), April 13th, 2005 12:46 PM. (mei) (later)

Being legible, well laid out and easy to use *IS* good design. Any designer sending you stuff that doesn't place these things first is a BAD designer. A good designer will do these things AND give you an attractive design. Often these two things are also one and the same.

Also: using Swedish makes me a better designer, fucker!

soon enough I just realised that the web was actually a pretty poor medium for art, at least in terms of interaction and the extent to which it could really inspire. after all there are only two dimensions (simulating 3D interactivity in 2D space in anything other than an actual game is a waste of time and just causes a bloody nuisance imo) and it's a small contained field the VDU. at one point i started wishing i was a sculptor...

i know i dream of being a gardener quite often. sunlight. pace of work. seeing and feeling something tangible.

my coworkers all want to start a furniture making business. sometimes they sound extremely serious about it too.
m.

That is, I've never been a designer in the sense of having an art degree or having studied design etc. But I was a newspaper and magazine layout person for approximately a thousand years--some of that time before those nifty computer thingies came along and we used wax and razor blades and line tape. Dabbled enough in photography and graphics to know what I didn't know, if that makes sense.

So when I have my desktop publishing hat on, I'm irritated by clients who don't know what they want, want boring-looking things to "pop," change their minds several times at the last minute, insist on things that look bad, choose the least favorite design. Clients who don't understand why the newsletter can't be 27 pages long (what part of "divisible by four" isn't clear?).

At the same time, I agree with happy fun ball that part of earning a paycheck is pleasing the people who sign it, not pleasing my own aesthetic. And further, part of your job is steering a client toward making the right decision.

Sometimes you may have to let a client insist on the yellow type or whatever, and get punished by the marketplace. Businesses are not charities. They will not make a better design decision because the Design Weenie says so; but they might make a better design decision if they can be convinced it's in their economic best interest. A better-designed ad will get them more eyeballs; they will sell more sneakers (or whatever) if their ad is legible and clear.

Yes it sucks and wouldn't it be nice to be the sort of designer who could just sit in a room and think up good-looking shit, picking and choosing projects based on how much latitude you will be permitted and how much carte blanche you've got vis a vis somebody else's money. I doubt most of us are in that position.

Further, when I'm in a situation where I am managing the work of Real Designers, there's a whole passel of prima donna things that I wish they could let go of. Number One has to do with usability. Yes, I understand that you work on a Mac and you use your fancy-ass programs that don't like to talk to mine. Fine. Fine for when what we want is something that gets designed once, printed once, and stays forever in that pristine perfect immobile state.

Not so much fine for a situation where we want something that's flexible and that helps people turn out imperfect but non-ugly things that work in the environment where they actually do stuff, which on this planet happens to be a PC-based Office environment. So when we need Word & PowerPoint templates, for example, somebody needs to think about whether they work--as in, can you type into it in a way that makes the second page looks as it's supposed to? Yes I know a four-inch left margin for a proposal looks cool & artsy, but how are we going to make that work with our ten-page limit? And that fancy graphic that is placed just so is great, but it needs to not slide around when the editors add and subtract text above and beneath it.

Yes, I know, in an ideal world we would finalize absolutely everything on the PC side, send it over the MacWall and have you work your magic, then all changes would then go through a Mac/Quark designer. But that golden vision doesn't always work in the world we inhabit, and an imperfect but workable solution sometimes involves making something non-ugly but leaving it in an environment where an admin person can open the thing up and just change a frickin' comma or whatever. Etcetera.

So I have some sympathy for both parties.

mad xpost

They can't send you a pdf? Can you not work with a pdf in Powerpoint? If not, I'd say that's a failing of powerpoint.

When I was a "web programmer", this is what we did; and it worked rather well.

It isn't that Quark is all fancy-pantsed. It's simply a layout program. Word is not. No Microsoft program is. You can't design shit on Microsoft programs. Do your best. It's a fuckin' joke compared to what one can accomplish in Quark or InDesign given the same amount of time.

You get what you pay for. Quark is expensive! Designers get paid more than administrative assistants (usually).

xpost :: I use InDesign! :: after 5 years here (Ontario) you can become a Registered Graphic Designer!

Same here, actually. Except I'm about to start using it every day. The guy who currently lays out the whole magazine is going to come in and train me on it over the next couple of issues. I'm really excited about it. I had a dream about InDesign last night. I was just wondering what kind of earning curve I'm in for. I do know Photoshop like the back of my hand... will that help?

haha I meant "learning curve," but that's a freudian typo if I've ever seen one.

1. Layout in Illustrator
2. Export to Photoshop
3. Export to ImageReady
4. Chop up slices and Save Optimized As HTML and Images
5. Open in Dreamweaver
6. Fix buttons, delete useless stuff
7. Save as template.

Finish in Dreamweaver.

I only use CSS as external txt files to change the type. Fuck that CSS-as-layout and CSS-as-rollover-button noise!

Manual cut-up and export relying on Photoshop's own 'save for web' function

Basic html template in Dreamweaver, define styles for and create CSS file - add content, required scripts etc. (SSI I LOVE YOU)

Edit code in Dreamweaver or Notepad (based on web-standards)

Publish, test

Harangue clients for payment for the next six months

In other words, all of you up in this bitch need to school me in design. Where do I start? SURELY YOU KNOW OF SOME BOOKS, PEOPLE! Or do designers not read? My DTP/designer wanna-be certainly does not or she would not be handing me error-laden crap.

I guess you'd need:

- a book on grids (layouts)
- a book on color theory or just a bunch of color combinations to swipe
- a book on typography

A classic.

css is still crucial tho.

most of my user interface design is done on paper first. whiteboard scenarios.

there's some decentish wysiwyg application design stuff... and sometimes that's useful.

i'm a weird case i know...
m.

the people you want answering are 1) the new business gladhanders who negotiate the contracts in the first place, although actually they always fuck it up by overpromising and keeping things too vague, in order to secure the deal so actually 1) project managers/producers, who actually come up w/schedules and must figure out who works on what and for how long. if you do this step (unfortunately always done AFTER the outlines of the contract have been agreed upon, forcing the process to conform to the deal, rather than the other way around) it becomes quite clear quite quickly how much of whose time is taken up with what, and where the crucial points in the schedule are, so that changing a decision etc. can be quickly proven to push out the finish date by (x) number of days, because it will require (x) number of additional hours that must occur before the rest of the job is completed, which will of course require (x) many more dollars at the prevailing rate. the schedule is the hardest thing to draw up because it requires a bit of clairvoyance and a lot of experience, but once you have it, it's a doddle, because you get to assume an almost imperceptiblly superior air and say, well of course i'd be happy to change it, i mean it's your site after all haha, but if you look here - point to spreadsheet - and here - point at another place - you can see this will push out our finish date by three more days, and it will of course be additional designer time you're paying for, smile brightly and watch it sink in

I don't understand.

Because otherwise, clients tend to think they get unlimited changes for free.

at the bottom of all this it's about psychology and power. if the client respects your authority and your credibility, these issues don't exactly disappear but they become much more manageable because when you put your foot down they listen to you. if you're somebody in sensible clothes who's handy with lingo and spreadsheets and whose job it is to handle schedules, rather than design, you've already got an advantage. but you can lose it very quickly. so you have to figure out how to get them to fear you a little but also respect you. which is a very roundabout way of saying that $V£N!'s hunch about reading derren brown is really OTM - mindreaders don't actually read minds, but they're experts on human nature, and they're good at convincing you. these are the skills you need to keep clients in line and frankly they're rare traits in designers, in my experience at least.

xpost - I'm not a yankee tho!

Not really. All this psychology and power stuff depends on the ability of the designer to be willing to "walk away," which is totally unlike the vast majority of professions out there. Only salesmen, con artists and major tycoons have this come up so regularly. People don't second-guess most professionals to this extent or assume everything is flexible for eternity, and that there is no real skill/expertise involved.

My mother is a secretary (er, Administrative Professional) and, judging by what she tells me, designers are treated as if they are performing the same tasks as secretaries: just making a few simple corrections here and there. No other skill involved other than doing the grunt work to correct these problems.

Somewhere around the middle-to-end of project, Decision-Maker suddenly appears and changes everything.
This is an ongoing problem with every client, regardless of who "signs off" on what. Eventually, Decision-Maker appears and says, "No no, it's all wrong!"

ALTERNATE PROBLEM:

Client does not respect experience/decisions of designer and tweaks a nice design until it is ugly. Then complains!

Solutions?

It's funny because I used to agree with all of this! Now that I am the client in this process I completely see the other side - like graphic designers DO make things that 'look better' in a particular web 2.0 colour-coordinated kind of way but trying to get them to make a page aimed at another aesthetic is just completely impossible, they just brush off your objections and are like 'no I think it is clearer this way' - the idea that you'd want a website that's not the one they, personally, would like to use seems 100% alien!

not if they're conscientious business-folk, in addition to being decent designers.

this is a hard line to tow sometimes, but it can be.

http://clientsfromhell.net/

^ some quality content on that site. This made me lol:

Client: Can I get you to combine these two slides into one?

Me: Sure, it’s done. Check your mail.

Client: That’s not what I asked for! Why did you do it that way?

Me: There were two slides, now there’s one. What’s the problem?

Client: I wanted you to merge the content!

Me: Then why didn’t you say that? I can’t read your mind.

Client: Why not?

Me: Did you just ask me why I can’t read your mind?

Client: YES!

Client: I want it gold… like the gold in the glitter I have here.

Me: What?

Client: I just faxed you the glitter. Use that color of gold.

Me: When you fax something you know the recipient receives a black print out.

Client: Oh, I’ll just mail it to you then.

Me: That’s okay - I can make this text on your website gold without the glitter.

Client: No, I’ll feel better if you can see what I’m talking about.

A few days later I received an envelope full of glitter.

This causes all sorts of conflicts between client and designer. The client will have an idea of what the finished product will look like according to their own taste. What the designer creates may or may not be in line with that taste, which leaves the designer in a conundrum – deliver a shabby design that makes the client happy, or a great design that the client doesn’t want? Usually, the client wins, and the designer omits the product from her portfolio and rants on ClientsFromHell while continuing to pay rent.

(from here: http://m.garrettamini.com/2011/08/lessons-from-valve-how-to-build-a-designers-paradise/ )

I guess I just don't get how this is a conundrum at all - like, the client is paying you to do a thing - it's unfortunate if doing that thing won't further your portfolio but you understand they're not actually paying you to do this right?