Oh, I mean, I know style is not the same as design. I’m saying I hope he’s wrong about most web designers not knowing it. Ahem.
I think he’s right on the mark with that. I mean… we added a “none of the above” vote to the Kirupa site of the week contest just because there were weeks where none of the submissions were worthy of the honor. Everyone and their mother is making web pages… but a bare minimum of those have any formal or even self taught training in the field of design. I guess that’s just my opinion though… I really couldn’t tell you how many there are…just seems to me to be a lot.
A friend of mind does Graphic art for companies. Some interesting stuff, a lot of boring stuff, mortgage leaflets, etc.
Each time she’s acked for a layout, she does three. She does an ordinary one. Not too functional, not to flashy.
She does a bog standard really basic one.
And she does an interesting one which actually stretches her talents and tries to incorporate something unusual.
She then presents all three to the client.
About 70% of the time they choose the bog basic one. And the rest of the time they choose the ordinary, middle ground one.
Now that is a good policy to perform for your clients. At least you’re giving them the options, and the limitations that they may be faced with up front. If they still want the unloadable mess of Flashy gismos… well there’s nothing you can do… but at least you tried.
Yeah, I always tend to do that here at work. They ask for a design and I do one boring, one middle of teh road, and one flashy.
Surprisingly I’ve had a good response. They generally want the middle one, but with some of the flashier bits incorporated, now they’ve realised the sorts of things that are possible.
It’s kinda like opening their eyes to new options. :beam:
*Originally posted by Pierce Gleeson *
**the customer is always right. even when they’re wrong. **
How true. Right now i’m making a site at 900x600 pixels. And with fonts no smaller then 14. This site is going to be so **** big a blind person can read it lol. No matter how much pleading and reasoning we did with him he wanted it this way.
Sintax - sometimes they just won’t listen to reason. If I had a pound for everytime I’ve felt like beating my head (or theirs, actually) against a brick wall, I’d have… well, a lot of pounds.
Oh, and yeah, I like to come up with 2 or 3 designs for a client… maybe next time I should try and do a range of different potential sites (basic, flashy, crazy) as opposed to 3 bloody awful, gawdy pieces of crap!
actually… wtf am I talking about? lool! firstly: it’s not til this evening anyway… secondly, it’s private view today. sorry, blonde moment. cough but there are still 4 other days when people can come and see it cough
The best way to show your clients the possible designs you are going to give them, why not make a storyboard? That way if they don’t like anything about the design you can just change it until they do! And when you start making the project they can pay you 80% of your fee!
You wont have to make 3 designs and end up only using one throwing away the rest.
I tend to keep hold of all the stuff that gets rejected and re-use it on other projects. Just because one lot of people didn’t like it doesn’t mean a different set of people won’t.
I figure if the idea is a good one, you can always re-work it if it’s close to another brief…
