The age-old battle between designers and their clients rages on. Your client expects a certain type of design from you. They give you examples of what they want. Then they share their goal for this design, and your heart sinks. You know that they need something entirely different than what they expect to accomplish this goal.
Steve Jobs said something very wise about designing a product for a customer: "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." And the same is true of design clients.
Now, of course, some clients are the perfect client. They tell you their needs, their goals, and may even give you a couple of examples, but they leave the whole of the project up to you. When you present your design, they are in love and can't wait to hire you for their next project.
But many times, designers have to be prepared to either sell their soul (i.e. creative pride) to get paid or be prepared to walk away from a project into which they have already put too much time. Any time you cross a client, you will probably need to be prepared for one of these worst possible outcomes. Remember the saying, "Prepare for the worst and hope for the best"?
Very often, you may only have to compromise a little on your design pride to get to the invoicing part of the job. But disagreeing with a client's opinion is no light matter, which is why you need to know exactly why you should not always design to client expectations...
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