Another issue, maybe the worse of the two, is that many people within the committee do not know how to contribute in a constructive manner. Hence, many heads and only one wrist. People lose objectivity when their accountable.

Art requires no explanation. Design is an explanation. Design loses it’s balance and beauty when it becomes accountable to anything other than the message–no matter what strategy or barrage of opinions accompany the critique.

Sadly, this situation seems to have always existed and I’m not sure it will change any time soon. In fact, I think it’s getting worse. I’m tired of trying to “educate” the client — there are plenty of smart people I’ve worked with for many years who still don’t get it. For some reason, it seems they don’t want to get it. The best I can do is put my opinions out there and hope that I’m doing my part to make things better, even if in a small way. We all need to keep fighting the good fight.

But isn’t it fortunate that we creative people also find it so easy to laugh?!!

I appreciate your follow-up comments even more than the article itself– I suppose its purpose was to elicit feedback from others, and obviously it did.

It takes time and experience in our profession to understand what it means to provide a service that is helpful to a client and that is, in turn, worth paying for. Judging from your comments it sounds as though you know this very well.

From my perspective, I can generally tell within the first ten minutes of an introductory conversation with a prospective client whether the light is green, yellow, or flashing RED.

In the end, if we have clear perspective we can choose not to work with flashing reds. If we’re hard up for cash and have a team on payroll that needs work, well then maybe we just have to take on the project and be a little better at keeping the client happy and steering the project toward a billable conclusion. They don’t teach those skills in design school.

Savor the few opportunities to exercise self expression and “creative brilliance.” Even better, take on a self-inflicted project and enjoy being your own client. There’s a lot to learn from this as well.

Thanks for the post.

Not to beat a dead horse but, again, the parallel was drawn to illustrate that in PROFESSIONS, only creative services are open to negotiation and the opinion of children (too many stories out there with someone mentioning how their child approved/disapproved of something. God knows why but there have been reports of people behaving oddly on this planet). Certainly we all know that to be the case, even after delivery when the bill is “questioned.”

I don’t want to sound like a complainer when, after all, the point of the article was to identify and air a problem we all face. If this happened too much I would be writing more…and I am, but that’s another story.

The humorous side of me, which is asleep right now, makes me point out that if the business “dies” because the branding or marketing isn’t effective and the designer knows it, well, at least we don’t have to pay for malpractice insurance. Oh, SNAP!

Thanks for reading, everybody!