Chapter 18. How to Best Present Your Work

It doesn’t matter if the design you’ve created can’t possibly be bettered. If you don’t present it to your client in a way that captivates the imagination, you have increased the chance that your client will just say no.

Contrary to what many believe, good design doesn’t sell itself. You need to show your client you studied and understood the client’s problem, then communicate your solution in an appropriate manner.

There’s some important advice I want to share about best practice in design presentation, advice you can immediately use in your own client projects.

Listen and build rapport

Eric Karjaluoto of smashLAB (who shared advice in chapter 12) trained as an artist, not as a designer. Part of that training involved not only coming up with and executing ideas, but also learning how to defend them. This last point was notably important: in an art school environment, your ability to think critically and articulate a perspective often carries as much weight as the work itself. So although the art was presented in its final state, without the capacity for change, Eric still needed to defend what he created, putting him in the habit of defending all artistic decisions. A designer, on the other hand, must be ready to listen and adjust the work as necessary.

Coupled with a rather staunch work ethic, this made Eric’s first years as a designer more difficult than they needed to be. “I worked my ass off to make a project as good as possible, and then I’d prepare for ‘battle,’ should the client not be immediately comfortable with the proposed design approach,” he said.

Eric rightly believed that it was his duty to challenge ideas that would stand between his clients and their stated goals. But he mistakenly put too much emphasis on the finished product, thinking that the journey was simply a means to an end. In reality, it’s the journey that keeps the client on board, vital for helping reach consensus when the finished design is showcased.

This was perhaps most evident when he was working with a client who was a nice person, but who had some strange ideas surrounding design. “The engagement started well,” he said, “with a lot of positive discussion around strategy. From there, matters devolved. Relations became a little tense during the information architecture stage, so by the time creative rolled around, the engagement was incredibly strained. All of the fun was gone, and we were left trying to make the best of a crummy situation.

“I have to stress that this client’s requests were, at times, highly impractical,” Eric added. “For example, he asked us to keep the text large, variable in length, but never require scrolling—a nice idea, but largely a physical impossibility.”

While such requests were confounding, the way Eric chose to respond didn’t make things better. Eric was so focused on showing that his way was right that he failed to properly lead the client, and his company, through the process. The job did finally come to an end, and the results were acceptable. But it couldn’t be called a fun experience.

“The bummer was that everyone felt beat by it—both on the client side and at our agency,” Eric added. “I didn’t expect they’d ever work with us again, and I certainly didn’t feel like working for them again. This seemed like an unacceptable end. It conflicted with my view of what our company offered customers.”

Eric resolved that he needed to rethink the way that he and his agency worked with clients.

“Imagine walking into a store in which you are asked to drop several thousand dollars,” he said, “without even knowing what you’d be left with. Then ask how you’d feel if you voiced a concern, only to have the sales rep sigh and say, ‘No, you’re wrong. Trust me. I’ve done this hundreds of times before. I’ll take care of you.’

“This isn’t that far from how I’d been treating my clients,” Eric said. “They’d enter a process that likely felt quite nebulous, and I’d just retreat to the lab and get down to solving the problem at hand. I’d run through myriad variations, but I didn’t include them in this process. Upon presenting the work, I didn’t really want to be challenged by irrelevant points. I’d also get cranky if they asked their friends for opinions or tried to ‘help’ by contributing their own design ideas.

“Sure, the design solution is important, but it’s not everything. There’s simply more to what we do than the files that are delivered at the project’s end. It’s a relationship, a dialogue, and something that requires trust. As a result, we need to facilitate appropriate design solutions through an experience that our customers find accessible, pleasurable, and rewarding,” Eric said.

“This means slowing down, explaining notions that might seem obvious to us as professionals, really listening to client concerns, entertaining odd change requests, and—perhaps more than anything—explaining our thoughts carefully, instead of just defending them. We aren’t artists; our creativity is only one part of the value we afford our clients.

“The way we interact,” added Eric, “how our clients feel about the process, and the comfort built as a result of having established a good rapport are all central to being a design professional. We put a lot of time into designing work; we need to place an equal priority on designing a brilliant customer experience for those who trust us with their brands.

“Ease up on your clients,” advised Eric. “The end result is that it will get easier for you, too.”

Guide your client

John Clifford of New York-based Think Studio had a particular client who seemed to have a sophisticated sense of design. Trusting that sense, John didn’t feel the need to explain his ideas. But he soon realized his client always chose the safest option, which was usually not the most effective. “I then understood I needed to explain why and how the design solved his problem, and why one direction was stronger than another,” said John. “It also put the two of us in a position of discussing the design, rather than the client dictating how it should be and what needs to be changed.”

This is a lesson that I also learned the hard way, having worked through quite a number of projects before I realized my mistake: I wasn’t making a strong verbal case in favor of the work. Sure, my designs might have looked the part, but very few clients will have your sense of artistic vision or completely understand all of the content you’ve put into a design. So unless you talk them through the idea, all of that work is likely to go unnoticed.

Avoid the disparate client

Turkey-based graphic designer Atakan Seçkin recalls an instance when he actually ended a client relationship after the client was unable to choose from his options.

“I was contacted by a local solar energy company and asked to renew its brand identity,” said Atakan. “My client and I scheduled regular meetings with the participation of the owner and three members of the management board.

“After providing my initial concepts, the board told me that its members loved the outcome, but needed some time to think. A couple of weeks later, I was told they couldn’t decide because they each voted for different designs. They said they could decide easily if they saw the one.”

So Atakan kept on designing and provided new ideas. His client took more time to think. But still there was no decision.

“Then I understood that the problem was not the quality of designs,” explained Atakan, “it was the diversity between their minds, the way each of them thought about the company.”

That was not a problem he could solve. The project was unsuccessful, and Atakan and his client parted company.

It’s an example of what can happen when each member of the committee isn’t pulling in the same direction, and a reminder of the importance of the initial questions you ask your client (questions we covered in chapter 15). If you can discern this disunity early, you will save yourself time and aggravation. Be prepared to direct your client’s attention back to the design brief if you think the process is running off course. Your ideas will, after all, relate specifically to the answers your client provided at the outset. Sometimes it can be important to remind the committee of this.

I remember a few past projects when immediately after my presentation, the clients said my ideas were excellent, but after a few days passed, doubt began to set in and changes were requested, usually resulting in a less risky, but much weaker outcome. If the committees were in agreement about the proposed new direction from the outset, such projects could’ve been much more successful.

Too many ideas

One of my first projects in self-employment was to create a logo for a South African Web hosting company called Circle. In my eagerness to please when my initial ideas weren’t accepted, I suggested that I publish a blog post showing all my sketches, inviting readers to share their thoughts. I was at a stage in learning where I didn’t understand the downside of simply showing and sharing too much. My sketches were online for anyone to see and comment on. This meant my client was reading the opinion of people who would never use his service, and who might not have had any valuable design experience from which to make an informed comment.

Here’s what I learned:

1. It’s never a good move to show all of your ideas. There will inevitably be poor ones in the mix. Lest we forget the influence of Sod’s Law (or Murphy’s Law, for my American audience), if you show a client ten ideas (nine good, one bad) the odds on the bad idea being chosen are significantly shorter than 10 to 1. It’s closer to a coin toss. Whittle it down: Only show your best work.

2. When you present your client with too many options, the task of choosing becomes much more difficult. It’s much easier to choose one from two samples, rather than one from 50.

3. Inviting the general public to pass judgment (on a blog or otherwise) disregards your client’s target audience. Also, many who offer comments are unlikely to have any notable design experience. When your client reads the comments, that throws a further spanner in the works.

Any one of these mistakes would be enough to hinder a project’s completion, let alone all three combined. Needless to say, I never did finish that logo.

Concentrate on the big goals

It’s part of your job to keep everyone focused on the big picture and not on the micro-details that can derail a presentation. John Clifford shared a client meeting in which he inadvertently threw everyone off track.

“As I was wrapping up the presentation I made the mistake of asking the vague question, ‘What do you think?’” said John. “After some silence, a committee member said, ‘Mmm... I don’t really like yellow.’ Then another agreed, ‘I don’t like yellow either!’ Someone else chimed in with, ‘I like yellow okay, but it reminds me of our house color before we painted it.’

“I stood there, a bit dumbfounded, as people started talking about house colors they liked and didn’t like,” said John. “Nobody was talking about the project. To rein them in, I had to interrupt and bring us back to the work. I told the committee that we could get into detail like colors later in the project, but that we needed to talk about the overall concept. I said something like, ‘The main goal is to give your company a recognizable and unique look, while speaking to your target market more directly. The structure and language shown here address this in a smart, fun way. Do you agree?’ That way, everyone could keep in mind why the meeting was taking place and what we were trying to accomplish. Clients don’t need to personally like it—though I hope they love it—but the solution has to work. Concentrate on the goals.”

Show your work in context

Here’s a relevant case study from Chermayeff & Geismar’s 2011 book Identify (Print Publishing, 2011). When Giorgio Armani was first shown Chermayeff & Geismar’s new logo for Armani Exchange (A|X), he rejected it outright. The designers later found out that due to Armani’s infamously busy schedule, the new mark had been presented to him between meetings, on a white piece of paper. The A|X directors of advertising and branding, Tom Jarrold and Matthew Scrivens, then suggested approaching Armani a second time (which they almost never do) with the entire Chermayeff & Geismar presentation, which showed the logo in such applications as magazine ads, storefronts, and billboards. Once Armani saw the increased visual impact of the new identity in context, he immediately approved it.

Embrace feedback

To be successful, all design projects need more than a designer. They also need the client’s input.

Early in his career, Jerry Kuyper (a Connecticut-based designer whose clients have included AT&T, Santander, GE, World Wildlife Fund, and many others) resisted most feedback from clients. “After all,” he said, “how could a client possibly see something I hadn’t already considered?” Occasionally, though, upon reviewing the work six months later, Jerry would be hit by a bolt of objectivity and decide the client had been absolutely right.

“Over time,” said Jerry, “I have moved to a position where I accept any and all client or partner suggestions by replying, ‘Interesting. I’ll have a look at that.’ Two things happen: first, the client feels heard and included in the process, and second, they trust me when I show and explain why their request does or doesn’t work. The key is translating the specifics of what the client is requesting to an understanding of what they are trying to achieve.”

A few years ago, Jerry had a client enthusiastically select a logo. The client then proceeded to give Jerry many directions on refinement. More than 140 variations were created after the initial logo was selected, and Jerry spent more time designing those variations than he did the initial exploration.

“A few suggestions were so bad,” Jerry said, “I would have denied any involvement if one had been selected, over my protests. Amazingly, one of the worst ideas did open up an avenue I hadn’t explored and led to a breakthrough. I don’t think I would have ever reached that solution without being open to my client’s approach.”

The lesson learned?

“Don’t be too attached to your work,” advises Jerry, “and trust your clients; they can take you to some interesting places.”

How clients can be rude, but right

Nick Asbury, of England-based creative partnership Asbury & Asbury, was working on a brand book for a big client. He was pleased with the first draft—creative, funny, unpretentious, not what you expect from a brand book. The client committee liked it, too, but started rowing back on the idea that had originally excited them.

“Over a period of weeks,” said Nick, “there was a series of skirmishes as the more creative turns of phrase were replaced by safer alternatives. I won some battles, ceded ground on others. We arrived at a draft that I still thought was pretty good, albeit having lost some of the spirit of the original.

“Then the real client arrived. It turned out the feedback over the preceding weeks had been from the marketing manager, but the real person signing it off was the brand manager, who worked on another continent. He was one of the people who liked the original draft and now he was laying into this new version, complaining it had lost its spark,” said Nick.

“The feedback was pretty rudely expressed: ‘This part reads like a high-school essay,’ and ‘This bit feels like it could be from an annual report.’ And the feedback came with an accompanying demand to have a new version within 24 hours, even though they’d dragged the process out for weeks to reach this point.”

Nick’s initial reaction was the usual mixture of wounded professional pride, irritation at the schedule, and personal affront at the tone of the feedback. He was close to putting all this in a late-night email and firing it off.

“But at those moments when you’re most sure you’re in the right,” advised Nick, “it’s always worth conducting a quick thought experiment: What if you’re not? Once the initial personal reaction had died down, a voice in my head started asking whether the client might have a point. The tone of the feedback was annoying, but the content wasn’t unreasonable. The 24-hour deadline was a headache, but it was do-able. The big picture was that we both thought the copy had lost something. Here was a client fighting to make something braver, not blander. It was a good thing.”

Instead of writing that late-night email, Nick started rewriting the copy. After those weeks of gradual chipping away, he enjoyed rediscovering the spirit of his original work. And the result was an improvement—addressing a lot of the practical concerns the client had, but retaining the creative edge that made it different.

“For me,” Nick said, “it was a reminder that it’s always about the creative end product. The rest is process and personalities. Giving feedback is hard work—I’ve had to do it myself. It can come across as rude, when really you just don’t have time to phrase it tactfully. As a seasoned creative, it’s possible for cynicism to set in—you assume the client is always out to destroy your beautifully crafted work. But there are plenty of clients out there who believe in great work and want to make it happen as much as you do, sometimes more. When you find them, make sure you hold onto them. And don’t send them emails late at night.”

Presentation tips

Here are some final words from Think Studio’s John Clifford, written for this book.

• Prepare. Don’t wing it. Don’t read from a script, but know the main points that need to be discussed. I remember a colleague who neglected to mention one of the key aspects of our concept. Without hearing it, the client had a tough time understanding the idea.

• Be confident. Know what you’re talking about. You are the expert on the design of this project, so you need to convey some authority.

• When speaking, end your statements with a period, not a question mark. If your voice goes up at the end of each sentence, you sound like a child that needs approval. Designers looking for a job have spoken this way when presenting me with their work, and I find it very hard to imagine them in a meeting with any of my clients.

• Be excited. If you sound bored, everyone else will be bored too.