Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

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Designers often complain about Clients that don’t know anything about design and how they have to spend more time educating them. On the flip side, working with well informed and design savvy Clients can be a headache as well.

One thing the latter tends to do is over specify the type of design that they want. The end result of such discussions is designers, as a colleague says, become another “pair of hands”.

That is dangerous on many levels especially if you are responsible for the quality of that design. Also this can be a difficult situation as there is a fine line between Clients giving a clear brief and becoming too involved in the design creation process.

In general, discussions about configurations and how the product is used is great, but when the discussion starts to lean towards how it looks and how the form should be created, it is time to nip it in the bud, and re-educate.

In general there is no perfect Client, education and good communication is the key.