Be a good client
If you’re a good client, we do better work for you. A poor client just gets in the way of a project and hurts our ability to do our best work.
Trust is essential. You hired us for our ideas. Because of that, while you don’t have to take our advice, we’d strongly encourage you to listen to it.
There are reasons for every design decision. We will rarely tell you these reasons, it takes too long and is exhausting to defend every piece of our work.
There are various reasons why we choose a certain photo (or font or anything else). These reasons include composition, clarity, quality, a certain orientation, a certain color palette, negative space, emotion, ability to crop, size, price, etc. If you’re looking for a photo of a bunny, and we know that but still don’t choose a bunny photo, it’s not because we didn’t look or that it doesn’t exist. It’s because we didn’t find the right bunny. Going to istock and downloading a dozen bunnies for us isn’t helping us, it’s just distracting and then we have to take the time to explain why your bunny photos won’t work. This is complicated even more because we know you spent far too long looking at bunnies, and by the point you sent us some, you’re emotionally attached to those photos already. So our input is going to be poorly received. And the time we spend explaining all this to you could have been spent further developing your project.
We don’t bill what large agencies bill, that said, we don’t bill net-90 either. We’d rather not spend time trying to collect on invoices you were sent three months ago. Please pay on time.
Don’t haggle about the price, it’s insulting.
Don’t design by committee. Have one person make the decisions.
Email is a very poor tool for communication, but also — by necessity — our most common method of communication. Emails have no body language, no tone of voice, and most of the time, no sense of humor. Keep that in mind when reading emails.
Trust us, but don’t trust us implicitly. Working with you is the best way for us to improve your work. If you don’t share your thoughts and concerns, your design will suffer for it.
Choose your battles. We choose ours.
At the end of the day, we care less about whether or not you like it than we care about whether your target audience likes it. Seth Godin put this bluntly:
“The first rule of great feedback is this: No one cares about your opinion.
“I don’t want to know how you feel, nor do I care if you would buy it, recommend it, or use it. You are not my market. You are not my focus group.”
However, sometimes the client is our target audience, in which case, of course we care.
If you find yourself micromanaging us, please stop. If you tell us how to design, we’ll push back — once, twice, three times even. Sooner or later it just isn’t worth it and we’ll do what you tell us. The end of that road has two options. One is that you’ll see your projects escalate in cost — essentially, this isn’t work we like and we’ll try to price our way out of it. The other is that next time you have some design work you need done, we’ll recommend you find a designer you can trust.
Disclaimer: I’ve been independent since 2003. I can count on one hand the number of clients who were really bad clients. But it’s nice for even good clients to be reminded every now and then.
Something to think about: We have a few clients where we have such a tight rapport that we no longer have to sugarcoat our communication. When there is a mutual respect between you and your designer, that’s the goal. You will get better work for less money.