How clients can hate an awesome design
26. Apr, 2010 
2 Comments
I’m sure at some point it’s happened to most freelancers.
You spend hours on a design, working on getting all the last little details right. The design is pixel perfect, everything has plenty of room to breathe, it looks great and it feels like you’re going to hit a home run. Then you show it to the client and the client says “It’s a good start”.
A START?! How on earth can the client think that? It’s the most awesome design, some of your best work ever. The client must be colour blind and dyslexic!
Two types of clients
There are two types of clients. Those that know how they want, and those that don’t know how they want. I know that doesn’t make sense… let me explain.
Most clients understand the message they are trying to convey through a website design. To use a current client as an example, Skydive Nagambie, a business built solely on the premise of giving customers a mind blowingly good time, wants the website to hit you in the face with fun and awesomeness.
What most clients don’t know is how. They don’t know how the use of colour can affect emphasis, they don’t know how the use of spacing can affect cleanliness, they don’t know how the layout of the page can affect how people will use the page.
But every now and then, you come across a client who knows how they want things. They want a certain element to be the main emphasis of the page. They then have 2 other elements that they want as ancillary information. Then they have other elements that need to be de-emphasised.
These customers know how they want.
So how can a client hate an awesome design?
Designers can lose site of page goals in the quest to have everything look how they want it. Designers can focus too much on getting the little details perfect.
The brief might say, “This section of the business is the money spinner, and needs to be emphasised the most”, but you put it alongside other elements because otherwise it doesn’t “look right”.
When a client hates a design that looks awesome, it’s because the designer has ignored the goals of the client. Whether it was lost in the pursuit of perfect details, plain laziness, or inexperience, it doesn’t matter.
The goals of a page are paramount. Clients hate awesome designs when the designer doesn’t realise that good design is about reaching those goals, not making the best looking page.
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You’re missing the “clients that think they’re designers”; the ones that think they’re just hiring a code monkey to create the beautiful vision that’s in their head but they just can’t explain.
They’re rarely interested in the reasons behind various design decisions. They just want their splash pages, scrolling text and sparkling unicorn animated GIFs.
Although I don’t get many clients like this anymore, I actually enjoy saying “no” to these clients.
Yeah you’re right I totally left out ‘write-off’ clients. Sometimes clients are really colour blind and dyslexic. I guess I was writing from the point of view of a sophisticated client as opposed to a dumb one.
I think it’s totally fine that a designer can become a “design monkey”, where they’re told exactly what to design. It totally sucks, but it’s the clients money, after all.