Picky Clients: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

We’ve all had one before. The client that takes too much control of a project and squeezes the life out of it. This is a quick guide as to how to deal with them, and how to make, what can be a nightmare into a dream.

I remember the first client I had that tried to take over a project from me. To keep things ambiguous, I’ll call this person Mrs. X. Mrs. X owned a store that did invite design stuff. They’d help the client pick out the order and then place the order. Very little design other than picking a paper an a font. The rest they just sent off to a company who designed it and printed it. But Mrs. X was confident that what she was doing was design, and therefore she had an “eye” for design, and in turn, it gave her the confidence to design the actual site herself. She calls me up one day from a referral from one of her friends who was a client of mine. She calls in and tells me “I want a new website, I know nothing about the internet but what I do know is good design, and I wanna work with you in building the site.” I should have know then that this was gonna be a second guess the designer type of projects.

Our first meeting is at the shop. It’s a very cutesy boutique style place. She sets in front of me some examples of sites she likes. Pretty straight forward. I take her designs to heart and lay out a couple of potential website layouts. Over the course of the next few weeks, she sends me her comments. Nearly every design decision that I made was second guessed, questioned, and eventually changed. After making revisions to the layout numerous times, I tell her that I think there must be a lapse in communication as it never takes this long to design a website. I tell her I’ll be happy to finish the site, but the quote I gave her is no longer valid as I didn’t anticipate it taking this long for the design.

She writes me back a LONG verbally aggressive email claiming that I didn’t know what I was doing and a lot of the edits where things that she didn’t like. After going through the notes, and speaking with the designer that was working on the project I began to notice a theme. She would ask for something, then change her mind. I had no issue with charging more for things that we not my fault.

She calls me the next day and tells me that she has laid out the website and wants me to look it over. I agree to come in and examine her new layout. The website she laid out was quite possibly the worst design I had seen in a while. Imagine a pink gingham grenade exploded over a doily and created a super pink gingham doily mess. She decided the links should be in a certain array that basically removed any ability to edit them once they were up. The entire thing was against any morsel of design credibility that I had.

At this point I washed my hands from the project and just wanted out. We get the site up, it’s horrible atrocious. We didn’t even put our logo or name on the site cause we were so ashamed of the design.

That was the first project I ever did just for the money. It was kind of like having a one night stand with design! I felt a little embarrassed and didn’t like myself for it for a couple of days.

After that happened, I set down with my staff and we had a talk. We decided that from that point on, we would stand up for our design decisions and be more proactive about clients taking over a project.

Then in comes my next client who wanted to take over a project. This time, I saw it coming way in advance. This guy owned a car shop. He built custom cars that honestly looked really cool. We have our first meeting, and he comes to me with a couple examples of sites he liked. He also had a rough layout that he had his friend lay out that knew photoshop, but couldn’t program a site.

So this time, instead of letting him try and steamroll the project, I told him, I’ll give you one round of changes. We’ll take your ideas to heart when putting the design together, from there, you get one opportunity to make revisions. If there is anything major down the road, we’ll bill extra for each change.

It was amazing how the threat of adding a few hundred bucks changes someone’s attitude. We set down for the second meeting, where I had the design in front of him. He started to point things out and I politely stopped him. I said “design isn’t just design. You have web design, print design, car design, all of them require different needs…what would work with a print piece won’t work on a car.” Basically what I was telling him was that just cause you might have an eye for aesthetics, doesn’t mean that you’ll have an eye for laying out a website.

I didn’t bully him, there was no struggle for supremacy over the project. He respected me for standing up for the work we did, and the website came out really nice.

Now, the final example I’ll give you again is a client that didn’t necessarily what to take over the project, but felt that this was his baby,and didn’t want his baby to grow up to be a stripper. I can honestly feel for the guy. He spends years working hard to build his name up, make sure that everything he has done up to that point is quality, and it nervous about letting go of control and having someone else come in and mess up his hard work. That makes sense to me.

I find that a lot of times when a client oversteps their bounds in a project isn’t because they have control issues, or they think they know better than me, I think it’s simply because they see their project as their baby. They want their baby to grow up and be the best it possibly can be.

So next time you have a client that is trying to play god in the project, just tell them that their best interests are being taken into account, and that your work is just as important to you, as their project is to them.