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Co-published by Allworth Press and the Graphic Artists Guild The Graphic Designer's Guide to ClientsHow to Make Clients Happy and Do Great Work
— “Keep Ellen Shapiro's practical, useful guide to corralling and pacifying that ornery critter, the client, within easy reach at all times. You'll need it.” “Ellen Shapiro is one smart lady. Her keen intelligence, curiosity and design expertise make her the perfect person to explore the client/designer relationship. Her writing is always lively and filled with valuable insights.” “Your clients like you. They trust you. They inspire you to do your best work. They even pay your bills. Too good to be true? Not for the clients and designers profiled by Ellen Shapiro in this important book. Ellen proves that if these clients and designers can it, you can too.” — from Chapter 1
The Client-Elusive, Difficult, Coveted
Graphic designers are fairly predictable. We usually want the same things. The opportunity to do good work is at the top of most of our lists.
Yes, there are differences and debates. Over the last decade there have been philosophical rifts about legibility vs. memorability; classicism vs. new wave. But we're usually in agreement on what constitutes great design. We love to admire the latest expressions of creativity, beauty, wit, insight, technological wizardry. How did the designer do it? All of us want to do something of that quality and impact, too. Not just for ourselves, or to be admired by our peers.
But for our clients.
A Service Business
In the last century, the art world, as it had functioned since the Middle Ages, was transformed. There are no more patrons who dictate appropriate subject matter and styles. The artist now makes art to please him or herself. This paradigm shift has not only changed painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, it has changed architecture and even cooking. Celebrity chefs are independent artistes. (If you don't like how a dish looks and tastes, choose a different restaurant. Or perhaps something is wrong with you, with your unsophisticated taste buds and lack of appreciation.)
Are graphic designers the last remaining vestiges of the old paradigm? Maybe so. Whatever we produce has to please our patrons, the clients. If it doesn't, they'll ask us to change it. In the worst cases, they won't pay for it-and then hire someone else.
Like it our not, we are in a service businesses. The purpose of graphic design is not to express our feelings about the world (which doesn't mean we shouldn't believe in what we're doing). Our work isn't created for exhibition in museums and galleries. It is used, to give just a few examples, to “brand” a product or service, to tell the story of a company's year, to give people a positive experience, to unite them behind a cause, to entertain, to inform, to announce an event, to raise money, to recruit, to sell.
Not Just Any Clients. Great Clients
Even if getting paid were not an issue, we all need clients. If we didn't have clients, we wouldn't all be painting and sculpting and creating nouvelle cuisine. We'd be out and about looking for clients. With a great client, the process is a partnership. We don't feel like artists for hire. There is no servitude. There is joy and excitement in the process. We work hand in hand with an individual of vision to bring success to his or her organization.
Los Angeles designer April Greiman, whose work often blurs the boundaries between fine art and graphic design, says that she needs clients to give her projects structure and purpose. “When you work with a visionary,” she says (see chapter 19), “there is always a conceptual collaboration and from that you grow tremendously.” Pentagram partner and 2001 AIGA medallist Paula Scher also calls her best clients great collaborators. “The best collaborator in my career has been George C. Wolfe of the Public Theater,” she has said. “He allows me to do fantastic work because he has a vision.”A great client has a vision, a great story, a great budget. Okay, maybe not a great budget, but an adequate budget, or at least an understanding of what it takes to get things done.
Why Aren't They All Great Clients?
If all clients were like George C. Wolfe, we would all do work as awe-inspiring as Paula's Public Theater posters. Right?
So what's the matter with the rest of them? After all, you and I have the talent and the skill to produce work of that caliber, don't we? The only thing that comes between us and all the great work, all the awards and recognition, is the client.At first I was going to say, let's skip the horror stories. But, alas, there are too few great clients.There are few great anythings in this world. Just look around. Millions more people shop at Wal-Mart than at that cool boutique you just discovered. Most companies cater to a least-common-denominator mentality. Their marketing managers are folks with jobs to do, office politics to worry about, budgets and sales quotas to meet. Groundbreaking design might not be the number-one priority on their agendas, as you've perhaps learned the hard way. One almost-great client said to me, while choosing a safe, “plain vanilla” design over two much more interesting options (and, I guess, noticing the look on my face): “Ellen is seeing all her design awards fly out the window.” A perceptive guy. He put the tastes of his future investors, or at least what he envisioned they would respond to, first. Some clients have less noble motivations. A few are far from tactful or respectful.Yes, there have been the legendary Olivettis, IBMs, Container Corporations of America, Knolls, and Herman Millers. There have been the legendary CEOs like Thomas Watson, Jr., of IBM, who were, in fact, patrons of the arts-at least of the “commercial” arts of product design and packaging design, exhibition design, and advertising.
Many Good Clients Are Difficult, for Good Reasons
Good clients who are difficult can be the best kind to have. They challenge you to do your finest work. They don't want anything mundane. They don't want an imitation or something they've seen a million times before. They know that in order to sell their product or service it has to have a unique selling proposition, one that is visualized by a unique, effective design solution. They seek out the designer who has a distinctive voice and who can give voice to their vision.
Martin Zimmerman of LFC Capital offers the most articulate explanation of this I've ever heard (chapter 9). “Why would I want an imitation of what my competitor already has?” he asks. Zimmerman gives designers creative freedom within the structure of carefully articulated business objectives. “The whole idea is to create a feeling of success and sophistication,” he explains. “We want to be known as a creative-type financing source, where people can get new concepts for existing problems. There are lots of problems out there, but there are not too many fresh ideas on how to solve them.”It's much harder to create an original solution that satisfies requirements like Zimmerman's than it is to follow explicit directions, to do a formula design, to lay out a client's text and pictures. Sandra Ruch, who for many years had responsibility at Mobil Corporation for its brilliant Masterpiece Theater posters, prided herself on being demanding. “I could be very blunt and say, 'This doesn't work,'” she said, describing her working relationship with Ivan Chermayeff and other top designers and illustrators. “There were times when it took us four or five months before we came up with the right image. Four or five months of working it over and over. Ivan went back to the drawing board many times when he didn't come up with something that we all felt equally was what we wanted, and so did Seymour Chwast. There's nothing wrong with that.”When the client is knowledgeable-and fair-the designer rises to the occasion.
Remember, It's Supposed To Be Fun. And It Is.
Sure, we could have chosen to open restaurants or antique shops (and sell stuff made by other people!); we could be leading tours of Macchu Pichu or designing dresses or interiors. Maybe we would make more money and have less angst if we did something else. But we chose graphic design because we love type and images. We love print media that's ink on paper and electronic media that move us to action. We love to change minds and influence people and add joy and interest to the environment. We want people to be better informed, have an easier time finding their way around, and be visually delighted. Why else? There's a whole bunch of reasons, each as individual as every one of us.
Mostly, I cherish the opportunities graphic design gives me to keep learning. I've learned, over the years, about how bone fractures are healed with electromagnetic signals, how offbeat independent films are distributed; how premium credit cards are marketed; how executive MBA students are recruited, tax-exempt revenue bonds are issued, and maritime law is practiced. I've had the privilege of working with Internet game developers and with development professionals at Israel's leading technology university and at the American Baptist Church; with psychologists, scientists, financiers, management consultants, academics. I've gotten to visit (and write about and art direct photography at) some of the world's finest hotels and resorts; at medical centers where cancer is cured, and at plants where network computers are manufactured. In the best cases, I've been able to contribute to the state of the art of visually identifying and marketing my clients' organizations. I've helped motivate kids not to start smoking, and created my own products that use graphic design to help kids learn to read. And I'm not all that special. It's what graphic designers do. Graphic design is more than fun. It's a life's work that can make a difference.
from Chapter 2
Once You've Met Them, How to Get Clients to Give You Work (and to Get Paid for It)
If this book had been written twenty-five years ago, or even ten years ago, the word “money” would rarely appear. One did not mention money when discussing the august design firms of the 1960s, '70s and '80s. When a client engaged the services of a designer, the “deliverables” were quality and originality. In design classes at UCLA, when we learned about the work of Charles Eames and Alexander Girard and Buckminster Fuller (or about the graphic designers who headed the offices in town where we wanted to work: Saul Bass, Robert Miles Runyan, Jim Cross), it was understood that clients were looking to capture a unique talent and vision.
Today, a client's first question is usually, “How much will it cost?” And it's not just for informational purposes. It's to see if you're willing to do it at a low price. And/or to begin a competitive bidding or bargaining session. A guide to clients, by definition, has to be a guide to positioning and pricing your work so you will have clients.
You Have to Provide Something They Can't Do In-house
Quite simply, in order to get business, clients have to like you. They have to believe in you. And believe you can do something that they can't do-or shouldn't spend their time doing.
More and more, in the quest to save money, clients devise in-house “solutions” that involve buying and learning new software, even assembling books themselves. A wise design consultant might suggest that the clients' time would be better spent growing their companies, marketing products, contacting and cultivating donors-fulfilling their core missions. Nevertheless, most larger organizations have the staff for in-house layout and production. To justify hiring you, they have to believe you can do something that no one else can.
“Today, we've got to do the hard stuff,” says Peter Farago, principal of Farago+Partners, a New York advertising and branding agency. “Clients will only pay for what they can't do themselves. Farago, whose clients call him one of the smartest and most creative people they've ever met (even after they've changed agencies-see chapter 12) says that these days everybody can (or thinks they can) design a page, lay out an ad, set type, get a picture from an on-line stock photo agency. What can't they do? Create interactive experiences that will keep users coming back to a Web site. Build Internet communities. Brand every aspect of a consumer's experience.“We've got to keep doing the same things we've always done,” says Farago. “Tell stories. Tell the client's stories. But in new ways, with new tools.”
How Important Is Price?
If you offer a service they can do in-house, price is usually the biggest consideration. Or, put another way, the usual reason not to use in-house people is price: “If outsourcing is cheaper, let's go with a vendor,” clients reason. If you provide a commodity item, like page layout, you can find yourself working cheap. And being treated like a vendor. Or worse, like an employee (meaning you're expected to sit at your computer and make corrections all day).
On sites like Elance.com, price is the overriding consideration. At any given time, dozens of potential clients are soliciting bids for identity and stationery and Web design projects. Today, a career coach, a pain management center, a custom woodworking company, and a golf club manufacturer, among others, are looking for logo designers. Designers pay for the privilege of bidding, and there are ten or more bids for each, ranging from (gulp) about $195 to $375. You can view the designers' portfolios and read testimonials from other satisfied clients. You can read the designer's pitch letters:“Hello! I will work to design your corporate identity for you until you are 100% SATISFIED! I will create several versions of a logo for you to choose from, all ORIGINAL art with UNLIMITED REVISIONS based on your specifications and input.”Once upon a time, designers might have been able to convince upstart entrepreneurs, say, the custom woodworker, that spending at least several thousand dollars for a logo was a wise business investment. Not any more. Why should clients do anything more than visit Elance.com and sit back until they're 100 percent satisfied? All in the anonymous, faceless, instant universe of the Internet. No temperamental artists to deal with, who'll want to argue or might leave the office in tears if a design is rejected. The late, legendary Paul Rand reportedly charged Steven Jobs $100,000 for the NEXT logo. And he gave Jobs one solution, neatly explained in a little hand-bound book that graphically demonstrated how he arrived at the solution. One of Woody Pirtle's clients told me how lucky his $4 billion dollar company was to get him. Obviously, to some clients, low price is not the goal. They have other considerations. Architect Michael Rotondi, former director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, says of April Greiman: “You go near her and it's like you plug yourself into a wall socket. It feels good. You just want to keep doing it.” (chapter 19). He might have said the same thing if they were not living together.What about the rest of us, who are not a Paul Rand or Woody Pirtle or April Greiman? And for whom the rates paid by Elance customers are not an option, if we want to stay in business and pay the bills?
Ask for the Money!
Superstar attorney Gerry Spence, author of How to Argue and Win Every Time (St. Martin's Press, 1995) writes, “Everywhere I go, lawyers ask, 'How do you get those big-money verdicts?' I reply that I simply ask for the money. I tell the jury what I want. It seems that the more we want something, the more hesitant we are to ask for it.”
You've gotta ask for the money in this business, too. Okay, it's not the big money personal injury lawyers ask for. But why not at least enough to keep the business running and make a little profit? Why are we so reluctant to do it? We love what we do. We are still amazed sometimes that people pay us. We will do almost anything for the opportunity. And then we get angry and feel exploited when we realize we've made a bad deal.My son Alex spent a summer in New Orleans soliciting memberships and donations door-to-door for the Sierra Club. They taught him to ask for the money. He and other college students went there for the food, jazz, and beer, but learned lessons about life and doing business, doled out in daily two-hour role-playing sessions. Before the students knocked on the first door of the day, the trainers corrected their mistakes from the day before and made sure they had the pitch down cold: “It's great know you feel the same way we do about big oil companies polluting the Gulf of Mexico,” they were coached to say. “We really appreciate your $25 membership in the Sierra Club. But, you know, if you gave $50 or $75, we could accomplish so much more.”You're already there. You have a willing, sympathetic customer. Seven people have slammed the door in your face. This one believes in your cause. He or she is on your side. The checkbook is out. The pen is poised. Ask for the money! What's there to lose? But in design, if you ask for too much, they could go somewhere else. They very likely will, in fact, if your fee is too high. It's not like getting the $25 instead of the $50. It could mean getting all the way there, to the proposal stage, and getting nothing.
First, Find Out What They Want
Before you ask for the money, you have to know what they want and how much they are willing to spend. This isn't always easy. But remember what Gerry Spence advises: “Tell them what you want.”
“I want to do this job for you.”“I will do a good job.”“Here's how much I need: $10,000. Or $50,000.”Ah, but the client wants to spend $5,000. Or $25,000. The budget is more or less set. And they haven't told you because it's a competitive bidding situation. Here's a typical (losing) scenario….
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