A client will always be looking to get the most for their money. One way they do this is by Web Designers presenting multiple design concepts, only for the majority of this work to become worthless when a single design is selected.
So why create multiple designs when there are so many benefits in creating just one:
1. Waste
Imagine that for each client you create three designs working a full day on each. When you go to the client to present the design they chose their favourite and the other two are binned leaving you with 2 days of work lost that could have been spent on other projects.
Of course should the project be budgeted correctly those two days would be paid, but I personally hate the idea of good designs going to waste.
2. Differentiation
I must admit that when it comes to a project I can have a rather one track mind over how I think the design should look. So when it comes to thinking of different ideas of how a project may look I can struggle. This usually means that any subsequent concepts can suffer in quality and aren’t significantly different enough from the first design.
If you communicate effectively with your client you should have a strong idea of what the client is after from the design. So when creating a design if you are able to merge the client’s ideas and your own into a single concept there is little need to create multiple designs.
3. Blended Design
When approaching a design a client’s role is that of problem finder. When viewing a design they should locate issues with the design, make suggestions and then allow the designer to find the best solution to compliment the design.
When you present multiple designs to a client they will instead look to find solutions within the other designs. This gives them the added satisfaction that they have gotten value for money from all the designs as well as a feeling of control over the final design. This can result in an unbalanced design as the elements from each concept may not work well together, creating a mess of ideas.
4. Iterations
Creating a single design is not the holy grail of design and will not guarantee design sign off. The best case scenario is that a client will love the design straight away; however the design may go through a process of iterations to tweak the design until it meet the clients’ requirements.
However the worst case scenario is that you have to redesign the concept completely. Although this can be disheartening it all helps to work towards a final design as you gain extra information about the requirements of your client.
Not all clients will like being presented with a single design, and in these situations it’s always best to work to the clients’ requirements, so long as they pay for it. But for the majority of clients they will trust you as the designer to do what’s best for them and anything that keeps costs down is good.
3 Comments
I totally agree.
Quite often we get clients at work asking for at least two designs but after explaning that it technically means we have to half the time spent on the design they soon realise that they are actually missing out on a potentially great idea.
I much prefer to spend time working on one good idea and discuss changes with the client rather than waste time waiting for them to decide which bits of each they like!
Jack | www.glasshills.co.uk 19th December 2008 @ 1:18 pm
I think it largely depends on who the client is and what they are like.
In an ideal world there would only have to be one design produced with no changes needed making to it, and the client would just run with it. This rarely happens, and I do think that it’s for the better. It allows for external criticism and introduces different ways of thinking.
If the client is forthcoming with their ideas whereby a discussion can take place and you pretty much have the design ironed out before Photoshop is open, then perhaps only one design is necessary.
On the other hand, if the client is hesitant about what they are thinking and you are starting from a complete blank canvas, it might be worth producing three or four designs each taking the brand/product/service in a different direction, e.g. clean, corporate, grungy, fun.
I disagree with your statement, “when approaching a design a client’s role is that of problem finder”. It is the designer’s role to solve any problems that arise from the design. The large amount of clients I have worked with aren’t particularly ‘web aware’ and don’t consider there being a problem when a design element is constructed for 100 characters of text, when in fact 1000 characters is more likely.
Again, I think that it is all about the requirements gathering and trying to get into the client’s head with what they are looking for. The less time and resource spent the better, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a single design will suffice.
Scott Mallinson | www.scottmallinson.com 19th December 2008 @ 2:24 pm
@scott it’s possible ‘problem finder’ is not the best term, I tried to find something that fitted better but could not. I wasn’t trying to say that as a designer you should not be aware of the potential issues a design may have and modify accordingly, theres always going to be a bit of second guessing what the client will do with a website once finished and the designer should try to allow for that in the design.
The idea I was trying to get at is by doing mulitple designs you provide the client with an easy source of material to find alternatives to parts of designs they do not like. In most cases it is not so easy to transfer elements or ideas from one design to another. Instead it should be the clients role to locate what they feel doesn’t work with a design, whatever form this may take, and allow the designer to best solve the problem so that it balances with the design so far.
kean 19th December 2008 @ 2:41 pm