Your Vision or Ours

Which kind of client are you?

Someone who hires a design firm to act as the technical know how, who can get your project done the way you have it visioned in your head.

Or are you someone who hires a professional design firm because of their expertise, experience and knowledge of what makes a design successful?

In all my years of designing I have finally realized that clients fall into these two types of clients.

I believe both types would like to say we want to see what you can do, but most are saying to themselves boy I hope it looks like what I am thinking.

I think a client knows how subjective design is and they realize that you as the designer are doing the design and they don't want to offend you, by saying I don't like what you did so they try and make nips and tucks along the way to try and get their vision done.

I hope to educate all clients out there that they can't say anything to us either what we don't already say to ourselves while designing the site, or the kind of criticism we give each other when showcasing our work with other designers.

So please feel free to say this didn't "hit" or you missed with that, we understand and can roll with it, but please refrain from saying "did you think of doing such and such with that element?" because chances are we either did and realized it didn't look right, or there is no way I would have done that because it that would never look right or if I did and thought it would look right we would have done that.

Don't get me wrong we want to hear your feedback, I subscribe to the thought to not jump down a clients throat when they add a comment to a project I just bled, sweat and cried over, because they might actually have an idea that could push the design even better. Which happens more times than a designer would like to admit.

But this post wants to set the type of client straight from the beginning. Designers want to do good design, but we also want to get a project completed, so if you are looking for someone who knows the software and is capable of illustrating your vision, please be explicit in saying this from the beginning of the project, minimizing multiple rounds of revisions, to a designers design, because your afraid to hurt their feelings.

But if you truly want to go with whatever creative vision a designer has then go with it. Trust their instinct, you will get much better work that way...

Hope this helps