How to Cultivate Great Working Relationships
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, we have another short video by Design Council which tackles the subject of cultivating great working relationships with your clients, with advice from eight of today’s biggest names in the field. Here are a few of my favorite highlights…
“If I go to see the doctor, I accept that the doctor has trained, has skill, has experience, is concentrating on one aspect of me. I’ve asked them to do that. What I don’t do is what bad graphic design clients do. I don’t lean over the doctor’s shoulder and say, ‘Could we make that pill a bit larger?’”
— QUENTIN NEWARK, ATELIER WORKS
“A good client has the responsibility to choose the designer that they’re going to work on the project with carefully, and when they get that job right it makes your job a lot easier.”
— LUKE PEARSON, PEARSONLLOYD
“I’m not sure there is such a thing as a perfect client because people are messy, just like I don’t think there’s such a thing as a perfect agency or a perfect consultancy or a perfect advisor.”
— RITA CLIFTON, INTERBRAND
“You make your client a good client or a bad client. After you’ve worked with clients over the years you know how to handle them, from a selfish point-of-view to get the best out of them, but also, to give them the best.”
— EDWARD BARBER, BARBEROSGERBY
“Most clients come to us with no real idea of what identity they’re trying to achieve. They’ll often come to us thinking that what they need is a new logo, that going forwards all their problems will be solved by this new logo, and our response to them would normally be, ‘Who do you think you are? How does your audience see you? How would you like your audience to be seeing you?’”
— NEVILLE BRODY
This video is just under 7:00 long, meaning it’s a great way to get your morning started in the right direction. You may want to grab some sticky notes and a pen…
(Click here to watch the video elsewhere)
Fascinating stuff. If you were to take their advice, how would it change your day-to-day actions?
