by Kelli Anderson

When people ask me about freelancing, one of the first things I mention is how great it is to have clients choosing me for me, for my work, and not a firm’s eclectic portfolio. Before freelancing, I used to hate getting matched up with a client who just wasn’t a good fit for my style/skills, but may have been a great fit for the designer sitting next to me. I could blame that on a lack of good project management, or communication skills between the firm and our clients, but at the end of the day, things get hectic and designers get thrown on projects. I wondered if a better designer could be more accommodating.

Today, I love that my portfolio is filled with the work I’m proudest of, and those pieces are what bring my clients to me. In the past couple years I’ve designed for wedding photographers, an event planning company, a gardening boutique, an Italian restaurant, design bloggers, a letterpress company, and many brides. A few years ago I would have never had the chance to work with clients like that.

Pietari Posti, via Design Work Life

But there is a down-side to working with highly visual clients. Although I encourage my clients to send me gobs of inspiration photos (usually gathered from various design blogs—love those design savvy clients!), there’s a fine line between having a good starting point or knowing your client’s taste, and having them art direct the whole project. A few times, I’ve had clients complain that after grueling rounds of revision and “move this 1/4″ to the left” and “I found a font that I’d like you to use instead” type art direction, that the project I was working on just didn’t look like other pieces in my portfolio. It’s all I can do to hold my tongue… if you don’t want to let the designer do their job, what did you hire them for?

In the worst of these cases, I have to have copyright discussions with clients to explain that although they sent me an example of THE perfect design solution, we have to use it as a source of inspiration and not a starting point. Not something that can be tweaked with their color scheme and copy. Again I find myself holding my tongue… because if a client has found a designer whose work is perfect, why didn’t they contact them instead of me?

Product Superior, via Oh So Beautiful Paper

Don’t get me wrong, communication is important, feedback is important, and I owe much of my better work to clients who asked for smart revisions, or had a killer project idea from the get-go. I think it often comes down to how I handle the client relationship, and whether or not that client believes I have a talent worth hiring, a professional opinion worth trusting.

I’ve gotten much better at pinpointing these tough clients earlier, and much more comfortable telling someone that I’m just not a good fit for their project. I have enough A+ clients to know that more of their kind will come along. But when one of those micro-managing clients* comes out of the woodwork, I don’t always know how to handle the situation. I asked a few designers I admire to weigh in, and found their responses to be really helpful.

Kristy Martino, HAM:
Obviously it’s a balancing act; keep the client happy and involved but service their audience and create work that you believe in. Ultimately, I think it’s a question of leadership. We are professionals with training, expertise and talent. In a way, it’s up to us to lead our clients in the right direction, help them make informed decisions along the way and at a very base level, develop a relationship that is trustworthy on both ends. That may seem like a lot of variables, but every interaction with your client builds upon them and makes those tenets stronger. If not, we may as well work in a factory, right? Not that that’s the worst thing in the world. They probably get dental insurance!

Courtney Dolloff Eliseo, Seamless Creative:
What I’ve really tried to focus on is preventative measures, in order to avoid getting into a situation where this happens. Because generally it just makes all parties involved miserable and results in subpar work.
Usually it seems that the clients who do this type of thing don’t have a ton of respect for or understanding of the design process—there’s a lack of trust there. So I think that it’s really important to try to gauge this at the first point of contact, whether it’s a phone call or a meeting, or over email. At that time I always do my best to clearly explain how I work, which is especially important if the client has never worked with a designer before. Their business is, of course, really important to them; and how can they trust you if they don’t understand what it is exactly that you’re doing? Then if at that point they don’t seem to get it or agree with your point of view, you know it’s not a good fit. And it’s probably not a good idea to work with them in the first place, unless you want to drive yourself crazy.
Sometimes though, it’s impossible to predict and you run into a situation where a client really wants something a certain way and won’t budge on it. In that case, I like to show them exactly what they asked for, and then show an additional option that is what I believe to be the better solution, and try to give really solid rationale to back it up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; but it’s pretty much always worth a shot.

*I struggled to hit publish on this post, because I love every last one of my clients and know many of them read Mint. I’m writing this as a way to start a discussion among other designers, not to pinpoint particular situations… I think this kind of thing often arises from a lack of trust and communication, which is most certainly a two-way street.

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Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track.