Personal preferences and uninformed opinions can sabotage the planning process. We were told back in 2021 that we’d had enough experts. it absolutely was the year that populism surged on either side of the Atlantic, and ‘fake news
became a household phrase. Perhaps walking the walk isn’t as important as talking the talk after all?
Well, no. Leonardo da Vinci once said: “The greatest deception men suffer is their own opinions.” in a very free society, we’re all entitled to think what we like – but an earnestly held opinion isn't identical as a fact. There are such a big amount of walks of life where we all have to listen to a small amount more intently to those who know what they’re on about. Design is one among them.
As the old adage goes, opinions are like assholes – everyone has one, and most of them stink. Savvy clients work with experienced agencies because they'll use their years of experience to resolve a quick in a very commercially effective way. In short, it pays to rent someone who knows what they’re doing.
There was a meme doing the rounds some years back – a wage scale of what proportion to charge for design work. the best option, “I design everything” was the most affordable, progressing through “I design, you watch”, then “…you advise”, “…you help” and then on. the foremost expensive tier brought it full circle: “You design everything.”
It’s an in-joke designed to lift a weary smile in designers for whom relentless client ‘opinions’ are the bane of their working life. But there’s a significant point in there too. Our clients are the experts at what they are doing. We are the experts at what we do. Together, we build a fruitful collaboration that supported our relative areas of experience.
That’s to not say that great ideas can’t come from the client-side. In fact, they often do. Design-savvy clients see the method as a partnership that attracts our individual strengths, and that we welcome their informed opinions with open arms. No, we’re talking about uniform opinions. In other words, personal preferences.
Clients who lean towards a specific color choice purely because they prefer it, instead of understanding how a brand palette must be carefully crafted to suit the requirements of their business, and also the tastes of their customers.
Clients who request a last-minute change to the typeface on a whim because they spotted a font they liked on a menu, blind to all or any the factors that we’ve already considered – like legibility, brand personality, and whether it’s actually suited purpose across print, digital and the other intended uses.
Clients who, instead of providing the top-level input we want to progress and refine a design concept, roll up their sleeves and find stuck into the small details – make the emblem a fraction bigger, shift that line a pixel to the proper, and so on. It’s simple enough: if you’ve hired an experienced design agency to unravel your brief, trust that they know what they’re talking about. We haven’t had enough experts – have you?
