The business of client selection
By Kevin on January 24, 2011
It was nearly 10 years ago, right after 9/11, that Yang and I were invited to speak at the A! Desino Mexican National Design Conference in Acapulco. My talk was about design process and working with “good” clients.
A few years later at an AIGA conference, when someone asked how “big-time designers always show such cool work” Erik Spiekermann, one of my heros, remarked that while at big shows like this, everyone shows the cream, but of course “under that cream there’s a lot of dark coffee.” That’s one way to put it.
Michael Bierut is another hero, and as with Spiekermann, his comments rarely disappoint. I especially enjoyed this recent presentation on the topic of clients.
Then, about three years ago, I was at an APDF event where Rhoda Pitcher, management consultant and Director at Lululemon, was the presenter. Among my favorites of her remarks at that seminar was that she was “in the business of client selection.” I love that.
Here is the text and a few slides from my presentation in 2001. It had been published in an earlier version of our site, but Bierut’s presentation reminded me of it so I unearthed it here. I’m not sure I would say exactly the same thing today, but I’m happy to report that in 2011, I feel more or less the same way.
Over the past decade, in many ways we have been exploring new ways of working and selecting clients. We too are increasingly in the business of client selection, which is more or less what Bierut suggests. There’s always some dark coffee, but we’ll focus on the cream.
A! Diseno International Design Conference, Acapulco
Kevin Budelmann
September 13, 2001
First I started with a little background… then:
I will apologize in advance because I am going to skip around a bit from idea to idea, and hopefully wrap it together in the end. And I apologize for my English slides.
When I was asked to give this speech, two suggested topics were: “The Methodology at Peopledesign”, and “Which is better – good clients or good firms”? It occurred to me that these two topics may be after the same thing.
Which is: I believe that the best firms have a method for creating good clients.
First, perhaps we should consider what is a bad client, or for that matter, a good client.
In general, a bad client is someone who make it difficult for designers to produce good designs. (We won’t discuss what is a good design…) Bad clients frequently don’t understand design, and therefore don’t value designers. They hire designers because someone told them to, or they feel they could do it themselves if they only had the time.
Good clients understand the process of design, or at least allow it to happen.
We don’t tend to value what we don’t understand. That isn’t to say that we don’t respect other people, or that we can’t learn. Our frame of reference defines what is important to us. With any client relationship, it is useful to begin by understanding where that person is coming from.
One can look at the activity of design as a balance between objective information and subjective judgments. That is, designing is a process of collecting and reviewing hard data, facts, and concrete information which define the problem or design criteria. Then there is a point at which, during prototyping, a non-linear, intuitive judgment call is made which bridges the gap between the facts and a creative solution.
The model for this kind of duality is due at least in part to René Descartes, who pioneered the demarcation between matter and the spirit, science and religion. “I think, therefore I am.” For Descartes, objective reality depended upon the subjective thought.
In his book, “How We Got To Be Human”, William Libaw argues how the theme of subjective versus objective knowledge has been a deep roots in world religion and culture. There are many models for this duality: mind and body, spirit versus material, human and animal, religion and science, art and mathematics, left brain and right brain. And as we’ve seen recently in world events, good and evil.
Black and white is easier to understand than grey.
There are people who have a very objective view of the world. They may have a hard time understanding and valuing subjective things, and may not value design. They understand the hard data and numbers, but do not understand or trust subjective leaps of faith. In their objective thinking, subjective judgments are not quantifiable and are therefore unpredictable and prone to error. They prefer spreadsheets over graphs, numbers over pictures.
Very objective people can be bad clients when they believe design to be an exclusively visual activity – superficial decoration that is not very important in the grand scheme of things. It’s the ones who want you to “make it pretty” when they’re finished with the mechanics. Clients need to understand that a designer should be an integrated participant in the mechanics, that “design” is not simply window dressing. We hope that the solution is indeed beautiful in that it solves the problem in a unique and interesting way.
Bad clients don’t hire designers to think.
Then there are people who have a very subjective view of the world. They may have a hard time understanding and valuing objective things. It’s the ones that want to help you pick colors that “they like” (or worse, ones that their spouse “likes”). They prefer intuition over facts.
Very subjective people may think they already understand design. They seek to understand the subjective aspects of a design solution, which is dangerous because a leap of faith is not always easy to explain (or else it wouldn’t be a leap!).
Sometimes a little knowledge is worse than none at all. Someone who thinks they are a designer or wants to be a designer can be the worst kind of client. These might be the ones that can’t follow the logic of a design, or how it relates to the original design criteria they should have provided.
Clients should participate in the creative process, but should not use projects as a way to learn how to become a designer. They need to know how and when to let go.
Clients need to understand that design is not a purely subjective discipline.
This kind of black and white thinking is helpful in understanding a clients’ point of view, but is clearly a broad simplification – people do not neatly fall on one side or the other.
Albert Einstein said that “the only real valuable thing is intuition.” I don’t believe he really thought that, but for arguably the greatest physicist of our time to say such a thing is meaningful. One doesn’t conceive of curved space without taking a leap of faith. His theory of relativity was centered around grey thinking – the unification of matter and energy, space and time.
Last fall, I attended a lecture given by Mohan Sawhney, professor at the Kellogg School of Mangement at Northwestern University in Chicago. He argued that this black-and-white thinking may be a Western phenomenon, and though this Cartesian or scientific thought is useful in developing the steam engine and electricity, it may not be so useful in deciding what to do with it. This lack of a balance between subjective and objective thought may be one reason why Eastern thinking and religions in general continues to rise in public consciousness in the West.
Mohan described how the balance between black and white thinking is a metaphor in Buddhist teachings: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain.” The mountain is objective clarity, the steps between are subjective leaps of faith.
When I was in college, I participated in a design project sponsored by Apple Computer. Apple had recognized the trend of faster and faster computing power in smaller and smaller devices (prior to wireless, the Internet, etc.) – only they didn’t know what to do with this information. They asked various schools to participate in a program to dream up potential uses for the technology. Apple, a longstanding champion of good product, interface, and graphic design, was looking for the leaps that would give them a competitive edge. They asked designers to help them bridge the gap, and get them to the next mountain.
In my view, this is what the best of design is about. It’s a full exploration of what is known, then taking a walk to the edge of understanding and taking an intuitive leap of faith. Clients sometimes need to be taught or reminded of this balance, of grey thinking. It’s not always an easy task, but for me, its what makes design interesting.
This is all great in theory, but how does it work in practice?
First of all, what should you do about a bad client? One solution is to fire them. Fire your bad clients, and look for good ones. It’s a lot easier to work for good clients anyway, after all, they understand design and value designers.
On the other hand, this may not be good long-term strategy. There are more bad clients out there than good ones, and designers are competing with one another to get work from the good clients, so this may not be a good move from a business standpoint. It also hurts the profession of design.
By refusing to work for bad clients, you create a market for bad firms. Someone will inevitably do the work for bad clients who are willing to pay for it. The designers will likely have to bend over backwards or otherwise compensate for client deficits. Over the long term, this devalues design as a profession, which hurts all of us.
I propose that we try to do the right thing: teach your bad client to be a good client.
Teach them that design is more that the visual, that design require objective thinking. You’re going to have to dance with each other anyway. Teach them that design is a process and a philosophy.
Making designers be teachers isn’t an easy thing. Many designers are introverts, while teaching is a pretty extroverted activity. (Take me, for example, here, now). The now-classic Myers-Briggs test describes various personality types in detail. Various shades of grey. But designers are more equipped to handle this sort of thing than they might believe.
The first thing to do is to think. Many clients aren’t expecting you to do that. Ask a lot of questions. Then during your creative process, keep some distance between you and the client. Most importantly, have a plan. Bad clients may not be familiar with the ingredients for good design, so have have a recipe.
Think. Stop thinking about how this piece can round out your portfolio, or whose aesthetic style you want to emulate this time, or how unique you want your solution to be. Think about how you can use what you know to help your client solve their problem.
Remember that design is an invaluable asset to business, and therefore you can be an invaluable asset to your client.
Just before famed designer and design writer Paul Rand died, my wife and I were in NYC, and were lucky enough to stumble into a lecture he gave at The Cooper Union. I believe it turned out to be the last talk before he died. When a young student asked him how he was able do such original and memorable work, he said something that I’ll never forget: “Don’t try to be original,” he said. “Just try to be good. If you are original, then you’ll be original.”
Be aware that smart designers can threaten bad clients. Threatening clients isn’t really a good way to win clients, so be aware of a bad clients’ preconceptions.
On the other hand, bad clients with the potential of becoming a good client will recognize that you see your role as larger than the little box they’ve put you in. You may have something to offer that could help them meet their business objective. You may even be able to help your client do their job and advance their career, which is always a good first step toward making them a better client.
In order to help your client, you need to know what their business objective is. You must ask questions.
Ask questions. Ask about the broader context of the assignment. Ask about the clients’ industry, the business conditions, competitive landscape, customer and audience profiles and habits, communications objectives, and brand strategy. Ask how the piece being designed will be used, for how long, and by whom. Respectfully question some assumptions to see if there are good reasons behind those assumptions. Ask all the questions to get the answers you need in order to create an effective design.
This will challenge clients who aren’t prepared to answer these questions. Bad clients will again be threatened by questions – particularly the ones with an objective bias. They will feel you are questioning assumptions or decisions that have already been made.
Sometimes, if the client doesn’t know the answer to these questions (and they frequently don’t), more formal research may be in order. If the client doesn’t really know how their customers feel about their products or services, help them find out. You don’t have to be a research expert, but find someone who is and get them involved in the project.
After you’ve gathered this information, you’ll need to step back, begin to process the information, and start prototyping. Okay, this is the fun part. But this may also be the most critical stage in the design process. In general, it’s best not to have the clients around. Keep some distance between you and your client.
One of the best attributes a designer can bring to a problem is some degree of objectivity and freshness to a problem – something that can only be spoiled by the clients’ presence.
Some clients might not like this, and will want to be there during a designers’ creative process as an active contributor. They’ll want to talk about things like the color palette. This is potentially dangerous, and you may find yourself trying to justify half-baked design decisions instead of your true design recommendation. As MIT researcher and author Michael Schrage says about prototyping, “never show fools unfinished work.”
The same is true within a design studio. Sometimes, you need to work on an idea by yourself. However, I do not endorse the idea of designing in a vacuum. I strongly encourage collaboration among a design team. We frequently employ ‘group design’ techniques, where we’ll have just about our entire design staff work on a problem for a day or two. We’re able to generate a lot of ideas in a short period of time. Then we’ll critique them as a group, edit, revise, and choose some directions that a smaller team will continue to refine and implement.
Share prototypes with the client (before you are finished) at predetermined times. Outline checkpoints at the outset of a project. The number of approval points may vary based on the scale of the project.
Showing prototypes to end users prior to the completion of a project is a common, effective practice in user-oriented design. Just make sure the prototype is ready to be shared before you do.
Most importantly, have a plan. Many firms have a design process; I’m going to share ours with you. One reason firms try to document and share this information with their clients is to try to help teach clients how an ideal design process should work. In other words, to remind good clients how to stay that way, and help shape bad clients into good ones.
Our process map is not unlike many other firms, but uniqueness in the design process is not a virtue in itself. Nor does it have to be complicated – in fact, it’s better to keep it simple and memorable.
Note that a design process map like this one is an ideal – actual projects rarely follow any strict formula. But planning ahead and communicating your process objectives at the outset at least gives you and your client a goal.
Most clients won’t be taken aback by a process. In fact, they may be relieved. Much of being a bad client is not knowing how to appropriately work with a design studio. Mapping out how your process will take place can begin to teach clients about design, and how it will benefit them. Increased understanding of how a good design process will produce effective results can lead to valuing design and designers.
Before you know it, your bad client might just start inching toward becoming a good client.
Back to the original question. I’ve talked about good clients and bad clients. What about good firms? And which is better?
The answer is that one creates the other. The best firms have a method for creating good clients. That’s what makes them good. They teach clients about design by following a design process. Good firms with good clients create good work. This makes happy designers.
So you have to teach what you know.
They say you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can lead a client to a design process, but you can’t make them follow it. Some clients simply may not want to know about your process. After all, it’s hard work, producing good work. But I submit to you that in the end the client will pay for being a bad client, whether in time, money, or the quality of the product. Tradeoffs are always a part of business, but a good designer will help clients make good choices and still produce good work.
Clearly, it’s a lot easier to work with good clients than to try and create good clients by teaching them about design. And it’s an uphill race, with most companies not truly understanding or valuing design, and designers fighting over the ones that do.
But keep in mind that teaching someone about design is not like learning a lot of new facts or even the specifics of a design process – more like helping someone understand a point of view. As Malcolm Gadwell states in his book “The Tipping Point”, points of view are contagious.
The best part is that converted clients become good preachers. People who have benefited from taking the time to look at a the whole picture, and taking leaps of faith, and grey thinking in general value design have a tendency to teach others about it. One or two good clients can turn the whole company into a good client.
Tom Peters, author, business guru, and design convert, says that design is the “number one differentiator” for businesses today. If all our clients felt that way, we’d only have good clients. The more good clients preaching the value of design, the easier it is for designers – and ultimately the better it is for the people we are designing for.
Charles Eames summed this up by giving his clients an offer they couldn’t refuse: “It was never my design objective that the furniture be different or novel; only that it be good to sit in, good to use, good to look at, and easy for everyone to buy.”
Thank you very much!
President
Kevin specializes in design theory and practice in the overlapping contexts of business, technology, and society.
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