How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy;
Author:Adrian Shaughnessy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2010-06-15T00:00:00+00:00
/ Chapter 7
Clients Dealing with clients / understanding clients / keeping clients / sacking clients / monopolized by clients / professionalism / presenting to clients. Why there is no such thing as a bad client, only bad client handling. Or why we always blame our clients for our own failings.
There are no bad clients, only clients turned into bad clients by bad designers. This is a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but only slight. Clients are a bit like dogs: if we feed dogs and look after their basic needs they reward us with loyalty and devotion; but if we beat them and starve them, they become snarling mutts whoâd sooner bite your hand than lick it. Same goes for clients: if we want ethical clients we have to be ethical designers; if we want visionary clients we have to be visionary designers; if we want âgoodâ clients we have to be âultra-goodâ designers.
In earlier chapters weâve looked at what makes a good designerâbut what makes a good client? Well, good clients are rarely compliant; they are usually demanding, inquisitive, infuriating, and maddeningly inconsistentâbut with a fundamental sense of fairness. One thingâs for sure: clients donât need to âknow about designâ to be good clients. Some of the best clients Iâve ever worked with had no previous experience of commissioning design. This contradicts the arrogant, often-heard designer dictum that states âwe must educate our clients about design.â This is wrongâwe must educate ourselves about our clients.
The poor old client is often masked out of design history and design journalism, not to mention critical and theoretical discourse. If clients are mentioned, it is usually as an amorphous, barely tolerated, and reactionary force, and it is rare for them to be publicly congratulated for their sponsorship, patronage, or encouragement of good design. This chapter speaks up for the clients. Even the ones that bite.
Dealing with clients
The writer Robin Kinross, writing about Dutch designer Karel Martens in Eye, turned his nose up at the word âclient.â He wrote: âopdrachtgevers [commission giver], the Dutch word is better than our sleazy âclientâ.â You know what Kinross meansâthere is something sleazy and out of date about the notion of the all-powerful client. But we must resist demonizing our âcommission givers;â itâs counterproductive. I suggest we try to think of clients as partners: the traditional notion of the client as an all-powerful bestower of commissions is as off-target as the idea of the designer as a humble recipient of the crumbs from the rich manâs table. This old model no longer works.
So how should we deal with clients? Should we treat them like we treat our friends and the people we meet in our social lives, or should we veer toward the more formal protocols of business etiquette? Well, no two clients are the same. They all need something different: this one needs deference; this one is obsessed with value for money; this one is suspicious of designers and unconvinced by arguments about the value of good design; this
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