Clients
I don’t tend to get many phone calls from clients but when I do it always appears that the phone calls go on for much longer than they need to thus keeping me from actually doing the work I should be doing. Of course phone conversations are necessary at times to allow a more fluid conversation but both timing and content makes for some frustrations:
It’s frequently the first thing mentioned by a client when commenting on a new design and it quickly leads to a designer crying into their hands. On the face of it it’s really not that big a change to make but the reasons behind a client requesting it and the frequency in which a designer receives such a request is what makes it such a big problem.
In the past I’ve had little comeback for clients with such a request because I simply wasn’t able to communicate effectively a reason to not change the logo size. Why exactly would making the logo bigger ruin be a bad thing. Often I could see it unbalancing a page but this reason just didn’t do anything to convince the client. So instead I’d just make the change, too battle scarred to fight, and get into a stinking mood while doing it. After two requests from different clients yesterday I decided to have another look into it and see if there was a good reason out there that even the client could understand.
There are some clients that love a design so much they don’t change a thing about it. Some ask for changes that come at a point where they’re easy to do and cause no real problems. Then there are those that ask for changes that take ages to do, remove work that took ages to complete or simply, in my view, ruin a design. It’s at these points that working on a project can be a little soul destroying.
Sure the reaction is extreme and the people I work with have known me long enough to know the kind of reaction I have to some client changes but I’m starting to believe the place the frustration comes from is good, even if the outlet can be a little over the top.
Previously I ranted a little about how some web experts complain when we give opposing opinions about new CSS advances and how it’s not so easy to convince clients to our way of thinking. Although I’m not pushing websites with the latest advances I have started to adopt a few touches such as border radius and box shadow.
Luckily I’ve yet to have client remark on why their website doesn’t match up in all browsers but I have thought how such a conversation might go. And also how I might convince them to use the techniques with a better argument than simply ‘websites don’t have to look the same in every browser’.