Blogless

Adaptive Path wrote a nice post a while ago answering a question they had been asked by a client. The client, showing uncommon wisdom, asked them “how they might make the most of [their - the client and AP’s] design engagement.”

This is a sort narcotic story for designers (or at least myself), who, qua Shirky’s arrogant designer, fantasize about a world where clients ask us how they could make the most of our time. Unfortunately, it’s a rare occasion when a client is going to ask you a question like that, much less be capable of hearing and internalizing the answer.

In the remainder of situations, unfortunately, our interactions with clients are going to be influenced by, if not symptomatic of, internal disorganization, a lack of project clarity, monetary shenanigans, or any combination of the three. This means more often than not, being a design professional means putting our ability to be humble to the test.

Because, regardless of whether we have a great client or a difficult one, the project’s success rests squarely on our shoulders. It’s up to our clarity of vision, and our ability to strategize and execute, to mitigate against cultural factors in play at the client site, and to provide the best solution possible within these constraints.

At the end of the day, despite any idiosyncrasies of the process, the best thing we can do - and the only reason we’re there in the first place - is to solve the problem as elegantly as we can.

Black Square, Kasimir Maelvich

We do our best to work through these obstacles by listening to our clients and presenting solutions that we think will cut through the fog.

The late, great Paul Arden offers this piece of strategy:

A CLIENT often has a fair idea of what he wants. If you show him what you want and not what he wants, he’ll say that’s not what he asked for. If, however, you show him what he wants first, he is then relaxed and is prepared to look at what you want to sell him. You’ve allowed him to become magnanimous instead of putting him in a corner. Give him what he wants and he may well give you what you want. There is also the possibility that he may be right.

Sometimes, things click, and your design is successful. Sometimes it’s not.

That oh-so-valuable design-arrogance might tend to get us irritable when an idea that we’re invested in fails to connect. But the maybe-even-more-valuable-and-much-harder-to- come-by humility should help us remember that at the end of the day, we work for our clients, and we have to trust that they know what is best for them.

The situation will arise occasionally, then, when you feel like you have provided a client with a superior solution, and they opt for another one. As a design professional, you have to realize that you’re not in the building to change their culture, to push them further than they feel comfortable going, or to argue them into making a move that they don’t believe in. You give the best solution your best shot, and if it doesn’t work for them, even if it’s for reasons you don’t agree with, you accept that.

The heart of being a professional is that even when this happens, you don’t let it stop the quality of your work. All that arrogance, assuming it comes from somewhere, comes from the fact that you can consistently solve problems. The cultural limitations of your client need to be thought of as productive constraints, not roadblocks to success. Hence: If your client doesn’t want the best thing, make the best version of the thing they want.