Unit Verse

Andy Says: It sounds like you’re suffering from a couple of problematic situations here. Firstly, if you’re routinely doing design work for clients you’ve neither met nor talked with, you are in a bad spot. I suggest you work to change things in your agency or move on to a better one. Furthermore, if you’re not the one writing the creative brief for your client to approve, you’re at a grave disadvantage and so are your clients. The creative brief (or strategy brief as we more aptly call it) is something that should be an effective yardstick for how closely a designer is addressing the client’s needs. It is a form of commitment; something you craft that demonstrates to the client how well you understand their needs and your mandate. You need to appreciate this sort of commitment and the client needs to perceive this commitment from you. All involved are better for it.

Angela Says: As a designer, you should have an active role in the discovery process and in developing the creative brief, so if this isn’t the case, I can see why you don’t see the use in them. Creative briefs should not be internal documents, but a milestone in the project between the project’s designer and the client. This document serves as a written summary of the discovery meeting and the basis for what the site should communicate. Upon approval, the client can be assured his business aims are fully understood and the designer has a basis to form design decisions upon. A creative brief solidifies the site goals and can be used as a standard to measure whether or not the design meets those goals.

Nathan Says: I have been exactly where you are. Working without a well crafted strategy brief [that’s what we call it in the land of Unit] is kind of like playing capture-the-flag on XBOX Live. There is absolutely no game plan, no forward momentum, and everyone on the “team” seems to just be doing whatever they feel like. From my perspective, the strategy brief is an agreed upon direction in which everyone can go forward together, and is integral from the first step towards trying to solve any creative need. It should encompass all goals, and it helps if it prioritizes the project needs as well as smaller things, like target markets. The strategy brief is not only a plan of action, but it gives everyone involved, from the client to the creative, a stake in the eventual output, and this can often have the nice side-effect of a client receiving your creative efforts more positively. Thus your team can pwn together.

Fallacies abound in the design community, especially when many designers treat design as a business rather than as a profession. One of these fallacies is that when dealing with clients, compromise is inevitable.

When designers treat design as a business instead of a profession, our clients tend to regard design as a commodity rather than as a vital and powerful professional service. In this unfortunate context, it might be assumed by all involved that compromise is inevitable. But what really fuels the fallacy of inevitable compromise is when designers approach client design work with preferences rather than with actually relevant basis for design decisions.

If you’re a designer and you prefer that the design have certain elements, while the client prefers it didn’t, compromise is indeed inevitable. But only because you’ve polluted the design with your preferences rather than with contextually sound decisions that are meant to support the client’s needs and the users’ desires and expectations.

If you’ve used contextually relevant factors as the basis for your design decisions, and you’ve got the full confidence of your client, there’s no room for compromise. In this case, client requested changes will more likely fall under the heading of augmentation or different means for achieving ends. This is not compromise?unless you fail to gain the client’s trust and allow diminishment of the design’s strength. In this case, compromise is your fault, meaning you’ve failed your client and your professional mandate.

Regardless of what others may suggest, compromise has no place in professional design. If you regularly experience compromise, you’re doing it wrong. Do it right and work to eliminate compromise from your profession.