Every now and again you’ll run into one of THOSE clients. You know the type. They don’t really understand that a designer is there to just design. They’ll try to squeeze extra tasks out of you then drag their heels when you send them the bill. Time to pay up, son. Here are some of the top sly and sneaky tricks clients like to play on designers to get them to do more than has been actually agreed!
Making You Write Copy.
I can only shrug my shoulders. I’m not Jon Hamm and this isn’t the set of Madmen. I’m not trained in writing copy. Look out for this one, because it’ll creep up on you if you don’t pay attention. Some clients will come to you with nothing. No logo, no branding, no tagline. They’ll say to you, “The logo will go there and so will the tagline- in the meantime can you just put a little slogan or something there, just to see what it looks like?” Next thing you hear, they’re calling you up irate that they ‘don’t like the tagline you put there’. Well were designers, we design things, we don’t write catchy marketing copy and we don’t write jingles either. If you’re a designer, it’s not your job to come up with the marketing blurb or a snappy tagline or even the company name.
Making You Design Their Brand Identity.
When a client comes to you with no branding or logo, watch out. As a web designer, you’re kind of like an architect. You design the space or container into which whomever is going to inhabit, but primarily an architect designs the general shape and layout of a room. The interior designer is responsible for the furnishings. Designing a company’s brand and identity when they are not billed as two separate jobs is like being an architect AND interior designer, not exactly impossible, but not really your job either.
You really just want to design the site and place to content into it in a style that is consistent with their existing identity, but if you see they’re trying to change too many colours and fonts too often, beware, they might be trying to get you to do two jobs for the price of one.
Making You Proofread.
This happens when your client’s content is handed to you with incorrect punctuation, poor grammar, and bad spelling. The problem is, you can’t really ignore the issue because that undoes all the hard work of making the site nicely designed only to display shoddy looking content, similarly you don’t want to risk offending your client by pointing out his or her spelling mistakes, pretty much the same way you don’t want to be up all night looking for where to put your full stops and exclamation marks
Making You Handle their SEO.
I am not a web designer per say, really more of a designer who makes websites occasionally. Naturally through running a website you begin to understand SEO until it’s like tying shoelaces, you wonder how you ever have not known it. It must be said however, that Search Engine Optimization is something that is most efficient when done from the outset. That is, you build it into the design and the content. It’s really difficult when a client sneakily gets you to go through all the content they have given you and ask you to optimize it for keywords and keyword phrases. Unless you’ve agreed to offer such services, it’s probably in your best interest not to get bamboozled into doing it. You end up with more rewriting to do than a scriptwriter.
Making You A PR Consultant.
As a designer, sometimes we can recieve all the information and resources we require directly from the client, but on occasion we’ll have to work with and liase with other external companies to get the job done. The only problem with this is sometimes your client will leave the responsibility of co-ordinating all the different companies that THEY hire to you. They expect you to call up the web host, AND the printer AND the illustrator, only to find the client hasn’t told the illustrator they’ve changed their mind about something and now the images don’t match or something crazy like that. They also want you to contact marketers and publisher to let them know about the website and set up adverstising and listings and such.
As designers we need to be very firm about what it is that we are actually going to do, and it’s preferable if we just stick to design. That is what we do, we solve design problems. We cannot handle this AND manage an entire marketing campaign and order the hors d’oeuvres for your party too. There’s a limit, and if you know how to firmly (but nicely) draw a line in the sand with regards to the services you provide, you can focus on delivering what you do best, top notch design.
