Presenting a single design

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.