Everyone’s an artist…even Fishermen.

In the past few months I, alongside my colleagues and associates have been trying to find a way to not necessarily speed up the creative process of our operation, but make it more precise and accurate. So many times I have spent 20+ hours on designs for clients based off of their intents, and ideas of what they want their site to look at only to be shot right down. I take each instance as a learning experience but there must be a better way to handle these situations…

Pre-Design?! Is there such a word? Would it even be worth it if there was?!

A few days ago I came across an article that talked about “Mood Boards” and the positive impact they may have in a secondary design meeting with a client. Basically, you just create a simplistic design containing all the fundementals, and core elements such as fonts, colors, and logos. Then you present this to the client alongside your inspiration for each element, and gauge a reaction as well as make design changes there, before carrying on to the actual design. At first I automatically ruled the option out. It’s not worth the time. I’ll spend hours creating these board(s) for the client only to get shot down again and again taking more valuable time from the actual design itself putting me in almost the same predicament as before. In addition, I came to the realization that clients could care less about “design flow”, “typography”, and “hierarchy”. They want to see something flashy, they like to use the rancid term “make it pop”. You can design a site for…lets just say a financial institution… and they wont like it until there are bright flashing pinks and cyans, and flash animations with a batch of bunnies flying out of a horses womb. My fear is presenting mood boards to the clients and getting that bone-crunching blank stare followed by a comment similar to “so what am I supposed to do with this?”. BAM! ten hours wasted… back to square one. At that point it becomes a rush job to stay under budget with the outcome being a half-assed site designed around some crappy logo the client did in Microsoft paint twelve years ago.

In retrospect, I think a lot more clients out there think of themselves as designers, which in no way am I against. But, when it comes to a point where you have to go to another company or contract because your project requires much more than you can provide, leave it to the experts.

I actually think I’m going to stop there, the more I think about this option, the more I don’t like it. The point of this blog entry was to sort my thoughts out on the matter, and possibly get some feedback. Stunningly I think I just decided it would be more work that profit.

Streamline is such a dirty word…