Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

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One of my first bosses taught me an important lesson.

Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution.

“But if the work is good, don’t the clients know it when they see it?” I asked.

My boss just looked at me silently for a long time. And then, with gentleness and no small amount of pity, he reached out and patted me on the head: Poor kid.

He was right, of course. In any creative activity where clients are involved, you have to make the sale twice. Before you get to the customer, you have to sell the client.

I love this little snippet by Michael Bierut that highlights why some great designers don’t really go anywhere. The ability to sell a design is one of those skills I would rank very closely to creativity in terms of important ones a designer should have.

Via: Design Observer