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!
November 24th, 2008 at 5:49 am
Clients often don’t see that THEIR design opinions are subjective. They impose their tastes on their site even though many people who visit the site may not share their design tastes. They are design for themselves, not their audience. I draw the line if a client’s design forces compromises with usability or search engine friendliness. I just point out that their design wishes conflict with the ultimate goals of the site: to maximise the amount of targeted traffic flowing to the site, and convert as many of that traffic as possible to the ultimate goal of the site (normally sales, but it might be something else). I do not go past that line. Sometimes they’ve hired another developer because I do not cross that line. That’s fine by me.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I have similar issues all the time. It seems like I’m ALWAYS waiting for my clientsa to give me the initial content for the web site projects. even simple thiigns, like the marketing or wording of a page, they expect me to do it. But twhne they see it, then they complain that it’s not what they wanted. A little help on the client’s end every now and then would be great.
November 27th, 2008 at 12:46 am
I just have to vent anonymously here. I have over 10 years experience as a website developer.
The majority of my clients are pretty good. They either already have some grounding in what it takes to make a successful online business, or are totally green and I just take their hand and they are happy to be guided. And most clients are prepared to put in the effort too (content development).
However……there are other types of clients - thankfully in the small minority, but I have to vent about these types…..
It seems that some of my clients see themselves on an equal footing to myself in terms of knowledge of website development.
Did I just waste over 10 years of my life learning on a continual basis server-side programming, SQL, (X)HTML, CSS, SEO, usability, accessibility etc for nought? And the accumulated experience of launching 100s of websites - this counts for nought to some customers who tell me that Flash navigation on their site will *look fantastic*, I’m mistaken to disagree with him that it will impact on his business and bottom line.
This is my number one gripe over the last 10 years, and it gets worse as my own knowledge and experience accumulates, and I *KNOW* the clients “snazzy ideas” are just anathema to actually giving them visibility in the search engines and giving them sales and ultimately profits.
It doesn’t matter if I know that the customer is cutting his own throat. He is RIGHT. Of course he is. Because he thinks we just have differing opinions and we are equals. Remember, the customer is always right, right?
My patience gets stretched to breaking point sometimes as these particular clients want a site that “looks good” (for them only) and their very subjective ideas of what “looks good” is what they want. It’s like an art project for many customers, not a business. They see website development as purely aesthetics.
And the worst thing is this: the moment their site goes live, they stop caring about what the site “looks like”, they care about visitor stats and conversions. Hang on, wasn’t I advising the client this all the way through the design process of the site? - that every design idea has to take into account search engine friendliness and usability to maximise visitor numbers and conversions? Suddenly their art project morphs into a business in their eyes only after the site is live.
If I hire a lawyer, it’s because I trust him. After all, I chose him, and I’m paying good money to him. I tell him my circumstances, then I shut up and listen to his advice. Why is website development seen differently by some people? Why does everyone think they know best, even though they are so ignorant or outright unaware of so many facets of website development such as accessibility, usability and SEO?
Like I mentioned earlier, this is only a small minority of my clients, but they’re out there and I’m sure you’ve locked horns with them too….
December 7th, 2008 at 1:38 am
I’ve ran into this problem several times. I agree that it’s our responsibilty to give our professional opinion on any site we are designing.
But my biggest frustration is after giving the reccomnedation, the client remains stubborn and I do the site his way. And then, the very next week, they call up and say “Gee…you know, you were right…can we change it now?”
It would have been so much simpler if they just would have listened to begin with.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
A fantastic read….very literate and informative. Many thanks….what theme is this you are using and also, where is your RSS button ?