Pt2 Being Selective About Choosing Clients

For the Designer Musings

Define Yourself

The type of clients you take on will define you as a designer. The clients you accept will determine the projects you receive. The projects you receive will establish what kind of portfolio you will have. It is obviously very important to place a large emphasis on who you choose to work with.

Are You a Professional or a Merchant?

You need to decide for yourself what you are as it will determine what type of clients you take on. A Professional is selective with clients whereas a Merchant is not.

Members of a profession exercise discrimination in choosing clients rather than simply accepting any interested party as a customer (as merchants do).
—Design Professionalism

Quality

Is the client going to allow you to produce quality work? Keep in mind that the client is approaching you based on the quality of work that you have displayed in your portfolio.

The ability to produce these effective final products is strcitly dependent on a refined and time-tested process that is strictly adhered to. The client agreement should contains terms that reflect your policy. Your policy is an important part of your process. All of these are interrelated and necessary to produce the desired outcome.

If a client puts an emphasis on designating how you should do your job then there is a problem. A client should not be in the position of dictator but should instead approach you with a clear list of goals and messages to achieve and broadcast respectively. You as the designer have the responsibility to then take that message and those goals and produce a design that effectively communicates the messages in order of prominenece while simoltaneously accomplishing the desired goals.

When a clients asserts themselves by explaining how you should design, they are assigning themselves the role of designer. If a client wishes to act as designer, then let them create it themselves (i.e. don’t accept them as a client). Working with such a client will always result in a less effective product at best and a disaster at worst.

The ideal client will be focused on goals and content while entrusting you with the design that they hired you to create.

Do Not Compromise

Once you learn how to spot red flags, you won’t be able to unsee them in future prospects. However, this is not the difficulty. The difficulty lies in refusing to allow yourself to compromise after you have already been made aware of the warning signs.

Compromise begets compromise and that is a poor characteristic for design work. So…don’t.
—Andy Rutedge

There will always be “reasons” to compromise and accept clients that are not a good fit. Many of the common reasons you will recognize: Money, Once-in-a-lifetime Opportunity, Would be a great Portfolio addition, the client is a “Big Name” client, among many others.

Don’t do it. You will be committing professional suicide.
This is worse than missing a “good” opportunity.

It’s all too easy to fall prey to such illusions in a moment of weakness. The best way to avoid them is to make the decision now before the opportunities even arise. Choose now not to compromise on projects with red flags in the future regardless of potential returns.

Likelihood of a Successful Project

Even if the client’s values align with yours and their qualities are up to your standards, you still need to ask yourself if the project they are presenting is able to be successful.

Be real with your clients. If their idea is not a good one, don’t just take their money. Counsel them, guide them, give them professional recommendations. If they are open to them, they are very likely a good client that you want to work with. Conversely, consider yourself lucky to find out early on that they are not open to your recommendations as they would not have been a client that you would have wanted to work with.

By investing in the success of your clients (even before beginning to work with them) you are showing them that you care about their project enough to tell them that it might not have a good chance of being successful. They will recognize this gesture and likely come back to you with a revised project or entirely new future projects. They will also be more inclined to recommend you to someone because you have established yourself as being trustworthy.

Associating yourself only with successful projects enables you to be successful. A portfolio full of flops does you no good. There have been many projects by “Big Names” that have failed too, so don’t assume that won’t be the case just because a well-known client approaches you.

Select projects that will result in successful products and you too will be successful.

Conclusion

We are in a unique industry that allows us to choose who we work with. Leveraging this opportunity by wisely choosing our clients gives us the ability to craft the very future of our own career.