I’ve just finished having breakfast with a business development colleague whom we’ll call “Joe”. Joe told me that his creative director left a nasty voice mail on his cell phone that said something like, “What the hell are you doing? We’ve made the maximum number of revisions for the client and now you want us to make more? Who’s side are you on anyways?” Of course the original message was much more colorful but there’s no need to throw in all the expletives here.

The story goes like this, Joe and his print design company have been working on a very high profile project for almost 1 full year. During that time the client dragged their heels making approvals, was late in providing content, and changed project managers and resources on their side in midstream. While the client was doing all this, Joe and company were very accommodating to the client, pushing deadlines here, coaching new employees there, all to ensure that the project kept moving smoothly. Now it is almost a complete year after the project was started and the client is in a mad dash to finish up the project and publish it to make the hot summer demand for their product. Unfortunately Joe’s design resources are now all tied up into other projects that they have taken on while waiting for the client to provide final content to Joe. Joe receives a call from the client’s VP that asks him to do everything in his power to get this project completed as quickly as he can. To remedy the situation Joe had asked his Creative Director to make any small revisions that might come from the client, just to get the project completed and out the door. Now we are caught up to where the Creative Director calls Joe and leaves his brash opinion.

I am posting about this because I myself have been in this exact position before. The only thing I can stress is that there are no sides in graphic design, only solutions. I’ve found that designers tend to become too emotionally invested in their work, as they should be, and those emotions sometimes spill over into their relations with clients. What most graphic designers need to understand is that this is a business. You are providing a solution. If that solution doesn’t work, then you need to find another solution. It doesn’t matter how pretty the poster looks for that new band if no one can read their name. If you are in a project manager, business developer or owner position, I know you have been there.

My biggest concern is that this type of thinking is set into designers at a young age in their career. It is fueled by the snide remarks of a senior designer that may say “the client is a total ass clown”, or that design professor that may say “you must defend your design at all costs”, or the shear ideology of designers like Peter Saville who tell clients to fuck off if they don’t like their design (Sorry Peter, I’ve heard rumors). I’ve heard both statements come straight from the cow. I think as a profession we need to explain to junior designers and students that graphic design is about solving problems not creating them!

It’s not about Us vs. Them, it is about providing a solution that solves a problem.

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