Clients and Creative Control
June 25th, 2008
Communication, Web Design
What do you do?
It’s not your site right? So he ruined a great design with his cute image - big deal right? Wrong. It’s your responsibility to give your professional opinion on your client’s creative input. Even if your advice is ignored, you tried. Sometimes your client can be his own worst enemy and you can’t always help it.
Establishing professional versus personal opinion
Before you run off and tell your client that he sucks at websites, you need to be sure that your professional opinion is actually an objective opinion. If it’s not objective, it’s subjective, and I would argue that your opinion is personal rather than professional. The big difference between these two opinions are that one is relevant to yourself, while the other is relevant to everyone else.
- subjective: You don’t like yellow and hate butterflies
- objective: the yellow background will make reading the text harder and the butterfly will distract the user
Good luck telling your client his website needs to be changed because you have an abnormal fear of butterflies you weenie 
Avoiding the problem
The easiest and most effective way I’ve found to work with my client’s creative input is to have a good objective reason for everything on that mockup. The content is in order of importance, the menu is at the most logical spot and the butterfly image isn’t anywhere because it’s irrelevant. If you speak from the perspective of his visitors, he may just agree with you. I’m not saying that all client input is always bad or irrelevant, but if you can show your client that you’re doing your best to create a site with his visitor’s better interests in mind, he’ll probably trust you a lot more and drop the whole butterfly thing.
June 25th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Good advice Kevin. If you can demonstrate a good reason for every design which is there (and in certain cases the ones which AREN’T there!) then you’re also showing that you’ve thought deeply about the work you’ve done, which gives the client confidence that they’re getting what they paid for (which hopefully doesn’t include the animated butterfly gif).
June 26th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Having reasoning is for the way to go. Right now, my biggest problem is with a client that is demanding a finish product, but they have yet to give me any content. They want a really cool high tech looking site with flash, and this one post has five times the content I have to work with. I have produced nine custom templates for them, and am now getting ready to just sign them off.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
That you are saying it’s true…..we (designer) can help clients to want what it’s ver important for their sites (that we want to develop for them)……but sometimes we must agree with them because if they don’t support that they loss always….:)
June 28th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
it’s hard to be objective as a designer when you just KNOW your design is on the money, and then the client wants to take out all the great elements and add in a bunch of garbage. you just have to be sensitive when telling him that his choices aren’t good one. relate it to how the user will see the site. how it will affect the user’s experience. that way, he understands that you know what you’re talking about, you haven’t offended him, and his clients end up with a much better experience.
good topic!