The Designer/Client Relationship

A Clients Guide, wishful thinking? Perhaps. But, perhaps a consideration.

The digital world has vastly improved the speed of design. Proofs can be sent electronically and a great amount of design can be accomplished on computer in a much shorter amount of time than ever before.

However, technology has not made the design process simpler. Designers still need time to work with your company to decide the best way to represent it to the consumer.

Deadlines and project scope must be realistic and flexible enough to deal with the unexpected. Remember that you are buying a public face to your business, and value it accordingly.

Remember that your designer is a professional collaborator and not an employee, and brings a set of skills to your company that is geared towards expanding your business.

When you hire a designer, make sure that you make them part of your business day. Keep in touch at a frequency acceptable to both of you, and the design process will flow smoothly in both directions.

Designers, like all business contacts, appreciate returned messages, even if it is only an acknowledgment of receipt.

Spend an extra hour with your designer at the beginning to outline your needs and interests, and you will save hours of time down the road in regards to deadlines and project scope. Taking the time to deliver a sufficiently in-depth project brief ultimately serves as a cost-saving device for both parties.

A qualified designer is trained to analyze your professional needs and, with your input and guidance, craft visual expressions of your business. The client should understand that this skill goes beyond the personal aesthetic and often deals with the psychology of branding and public perception, and is as individual to your company as a fingerprint.

A designer’s suggestions and recommendations on the project are not simply what clients or designers find appealing or pleasing. Good quality design is engineered to appeal to your customer. Be fair in your criticism. Ask questions instead of making statements. If something does not work, explain your misgivings fully instead of simply.

Remember that your designer is a professional collaborator and not an employee, and brings a set of skills to your company that is geared towards expanding your business.

In addition, the concepts and ideas generated together represent a contractual agreement of confidentiality/exclusivity between the designer and client. Just as the Designer will not divulge your business operations, you and your staff are obligated to do the same for our business.

This is an excerpt from Business Of Design Online featuring Catherine Morley's A Client’s Guide to Professional Conduct in the Design Industry.

To me it all boils down to one thing: Respect.

Great read, pass it on.

That's Right,

HMK

This is a That's Right repost from March of 2008, thanks to el estratografico for the cool scan.

Different By Design

A new breed of consultant is using the tools of design to solve business problems creatively.

Surgeon Daniel Palestrant was laid up for several months with a back injury when he realized that it often took years before new techniques developed by pioneering doctors filtered out to the rest of the medical world. Why not bring physicians together online and, even better, charge businesses for access to content from their conversations? But the idea alone wasn't enough to get his social network off the ground. He needed to package that idea in such a way that investors would buy it.

Instead of bringing in a conventional consultant to help him, Palestrant visited a loft in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. In a series of meetings there, Palestrant rattled off his ideas--an outpouring he likened to "intellectual bulimia"--while Elizabeth Pastor and Garry VanPatter, the team behind the firm Humantific, furiously drew and took notes. "He was really deep in the trees," Pastor says. The pair made sense of Palestrant's fuzzy ideas and turned them into huge, glossy posters with icons representing how the parts of his business fit together. Diagrams in hand, Palestrant went to venture-capital funds and returned with $40 million in start-up money.

That kind of response is generating more and more heat in the emerging field of transformation design--a hybrid of business consulting and industrial design. Firms like Humantific, whose founders are designers, apply the same process used in designing sleek MP3 players and ergonomic teakettles to unwieldy intangibles like cell-phone promotions and hospital organization, transforming their effectiveness. Along the way, the field is creating some unusual teamwork between designers and business people.

Continue reading Chad Robert Springer's piece fore Time: Different By Design.

In short, the smart folks at Humantific are using design problem solving techniques to make complicated business ideas understandable to everyone.

Bravo!

The sooner the business community recognize and embrace the fact that impassioned, educated and professional communication designers are capable of bringing a lot more to the table (and the bottomline!) than just fluff, wrapping paper or "making it look cool", the better off we'll all be.

Right On Humantific!

That's Right

HMK