Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

So, basically, you want participation and guidance from your client because vague guidance is not enough (#1), except that you want them to not tell you how to do your job and to trust that your judgement will automatically result in acceptable work (#2, #6, #7, #10). Moreover, you want to work with an open-ended budget (#5) and timescales (#8) and communicating on your terms (#9).

Here's another theory: If I'm outsourcing part of a project, I will provide a specification for the work including any constraints I require, you will submit a proposal including estimates of how much it will cost and how long it will take, and I will consider your proposal and decide whether to accept it. You will be available at reasonable times for me to communicate with you, you will provide regular updates as the project progresses, and you will inform me immediately if your estimates are going to be incorrect, or I will not pay you. This is what is known in the business world as "how things actually work if you're the one providing the service and the other guy is the one paying the bills". Final hint: if you don't like being asked for a ballpark figure because it's hard for you to give one, then you were right about one of us being a beginner, but you have misjudged which of us it is.

(Edit: I would agree that co-operative discussions and effective communication are the best way forward in most business relationships. I just think the ideas in this particular article are so obviously one-sided in favour of the designer that no serious client is likely to employ the designer's services on that basis, so they aren't really very useful at all.)

I agree that the tone of the article smacks of entitlement, but the "don't" list actually does cover some big pain points I think a lot of designers are familiar with. I just think the article doesn't explain them very well.

"Here, I made a layout for you": Unless you really believe you are as good as the designer you're hiring, it doesn't make sense for you to actually do any designing yourself. Guidance, yes; clear specifications and limits, yes; a concrete design, no. If you could do that, you wouldn't need to hire anyone. It's like hiring a photographer and telling him, "Here, I set everything up. You just push the shutter button." Obviously you're the customer, but you're not getting much bang for your buck if you insist that the primary design be done by an amateur. It's trouble for me and it usually does mean a worse product for you (not out of spite, but because I'm hobbled by an ill-thought-out design that the client drew up in 10 minutes on a napkin and insisted be followed exactly).

"How much does X cost?": This isn't about having an open-ended budget. It's about providing a clear specification. Asking for a budget without any kind of specification is asking for disappointment later on. For example, a business owner asked how much a blog would cost. I gave a relatively low number to set up WordPress and do a simple theme. After further questioning, it turned out that when he said "blog" he meant something more like "Facebook competitor." Even better is "How much does a website cost?"

"I want to show this to my <spouse/friend/child>": This isn't unreasonable, but you shouldn't treat any one person as "the public's opinion." Unfortunately, many people do. For example, I worked with a guy whose wife thought it would be awesome to put pictures of her poodle all over a business website because the dog was so cute. Everyone else who saw a design with the dog was completely perplexed by it, but she loved it.

I have specified details of layout and had designers ignore them. The result was unusable because they did not listen. A case in point is providing a color header graphic of fixed width instead of a (faster loading) white-based background design which could scale to variable width and still look good.

Someone who provides a layout is telling the designer what they need and asking for it to be improved. You get better results this way. If a designer told me this was bad for them, I would use someone else. Saves me from getting something unusable back. That said, I think this designer is in the minority. Most are more professional and realize design needs to be contingent on tech/usability factors they may not understand. So they want information and ask questions when they see ways to improve things.

Yeah, I've known designers like that too. They're generally losers. Working with fixed-size elements is one thing, and being responsible for some limited part of a design is another, and those are both perfectly reasonable. I'm talking about managers and business owners who ask you to design a whole site, then draw up some design with their 13-year-old as a "project" and think it's pretty neat, so that should be your design. You can create something with it, but it's hobbled by the lack of thought that went into the initial design. And no matter how much you try to convince them and show them tests that changing certain parts would be good, they're emotionally attached to their idea.

I'm sure this isn't how you work, so it's hard to imagine other people are like that, but just like there are some unreasonable contractors who ignore your specs, there are unreasonable clients who can't hold up their part of the professional relationship.

> "Here, I made a layout for you": Unless you really believe you are as good as the designer you're hiring, it doesn't make sense for you to actually do any designing yourself.

I respectfully disagree.

For one thing, a (graphic) designer can provide a variety of related services, and some of them may overlap other experts on the team, such as the user interface team or a web usability specialist.

For another thing, this presupposes that the designer is the only such expert involved in a project. For larger projects, this may well not be the case, and there may be someone setting the parameters for the overall system and then a number of designers responsible for implementing the general rules in specific areas.

> Obviously you're the customer, but you're not getting much bang for your buck if you insist that the primary design be done by an amateur.

You imply a false dichotomy. I can't speak for others, but on several projects I currently work on we might outsource things like graphic design, artwork and typography to a specialist, but want to retain direct control of the overall layout and interactive elements. In one case that comes immediately to mind, that is because we have extensive knowledge of usability issues from a previous version of the software that no designer joining the project fresh would have. In another case, we have web-based access and various apps for mobile devices, and we want a consistent overall look and feel across all versions of the service, so while the designer is free to fit the branding to the natural style on each platform, they don't get to move everything around in a way that could confuse our users. These decisions are not made by amateurs, they are made by specialists whose job is to analyse hard data and make these decisions. I wouldn't ask these people to decide what kind of antialiasing to use on the web buttons, and I wouldn't ask a graphic designer without the relevant knowledge of our products to lay out the user interface.

I agree with everything you said here, but we're talking about different situations. I never meant to suggest that what I was saying are universal truths, just that the OP reflects common problems that come up.

I am a designer, and I agree. The article is a childish wish list that portrays designers as pampered prima donnas.

It shames hardworking designers that believe in honest work, open communication, and finding creativity in constraints.

I work with designers every day and I can tell you I had to share this around and their reaction along with my own is summed up perfectly in your comments. What a terrible way to portray the expectations of the design profession.

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