Working as a designer is hard. You need to talk to idiot clients every day who just dont get aesthetics, design or your creative genius.

Working with designers is even harder. You need to talk to idiot photoshop monkeys who talk pixels and standards when all you want is just something that’ll make you go “wow”.

If you’ve been in either side of this story more than once in your life, you’ve probably seen The Oatmeal Comic on Design Hell and laughed (or cried) a few times. Over my years as a marketer, product manager and startup runner, I’ve had the opportunity to play on both sides of the game, and I thought I should share my views.

As the Designer-bro

Over and over again, I’ve been the guy interfacing between sales, the product team, vendors, partners, and customers, and the writers, designers and creative folk. I’ve been the guy explaining the what and the why to my design team, taking their output back, and getting that 10,000 pound sledgehammer hit on the stomach when they shake their heads and say “umm.. can you make it a bit more…******?”. I’ve been the guy defending the ideas and creatives of the artists — my artists.

I must have had at least a hundred coffee-break bitching sessions and screaming at the stupid stupid client. I’ve been the one shaking with rage over the absolutely pointless feedback they give.

I remember this one time we had to create a product brochure for the head of sales. We made a rather awesome design IMHO — it conveyed the story, looked good, and I still proudly have a copy in my collection of “things I’m rather proud of”. The sales guy walked in, took a long look, sighed and with a heavy accent of someone who chews too many potatoes at once, said “Dis jest ishint shticky enough”. My team and I looked at each other for a full five minutes before I meekly volunteered to ask “what do you want us to do?”. He looked at us with the sneer disgust reserved for people you believe are too stupid to share the same airspace as you, before he spit out what was clearly the most obvious fix— “Make it more shticky”.

We finally gave him the same output with a 2 inch bleed line and a roll of duct tape. Idiot client!

As the Satan of Design

I’ve also had my fair share of being the “client”. Everytime we design a new campaign, push out a blog post, touch up the website, or gear up for a tradeshow, I’ve had to be the guy sitting in the design cubicles with a gun in my hand. I’ve asked designers to make their mocks more “happy”, told them their direction downright sucks, and even done the Cardinal Sin of Design known as “editing their PSDs”.

I’ve had designers who claim to have become “better people” years after I stopped working with them. And I’ve had more than one designer run out of the floor crying, swearing never to touch Sketch, Photoshop or Illustrator in my presence again. I’ve worked with designers until every ounce of their “creative powers for the day” have been sapped, and then worked with them a bit longer till I get a version that I love.

There was one particular animation guy who I worked with for 2 continuous weeks to create an intro video for a conference I was hosting. 2 weeks is 14 days straight, including weekends, of drawings, animation, iterations, and craziness. We lunched together and timed out pee-breaks to coincide. In the end, we had a version that “just didn’t do it for me”, at which point my man was close to wringing my neck with his bare hands. We spent the next 48 hours in an intense creative lockdown, and produced a video that had our entire floor of resellers and partners give us a standing ovation. Love it was, and my design guy forgave me (I think).

Which brings me to an interesting place — why do designers and clients almost universally seem to lock horns?

I’ve noticed it all comes down to 2 fundamental assumptions of designers that are fundamentally flawed:

a. The client is NOT stupid, and

b. The client knows what she wants

Confused? Let me explain.

The client is Stupid

For some strange reason, designers seem to want their clients to share their aesthetic taste and direction right from the start. They seem to assume that the client is “intelligent” the same way that they are. That the client can guide them through the colors and pixels to build, together, that perfect “wow”.

Truth is, the client is design stupid. She does not have the exposure to design or the refined artistic sensibilities that you have. If she did, she’d be an artist too, and the only reason she needs you is for your photoshop abilities.

And if the only value you bring to the table is your knowledge of Adobe keyboard shortcuts, you are a Pixel Monkey and you’ve lost the privilege of client bashing already!

The bottom line is, the client probably knows a crazy deal more about her industry than you do. She knows her clients and their objectives. She at least passionately cares more about her business than you do. But when it comes to the design, she does not share your thought process. If you show her your work in progress with just a big yellow mango in the middle, the only feedback she can potentially give is to “make the mango more mango-ish”. When it comes to design, the client is batshit downright *drools from the side of her mouth* STUPID.

The client doesn’t have a clue

Well, the client probably has a pretty good idea of what she wants. Which is “a new website that will convert more purchases on my site”. Or “a design that shows us a cool, young brand”. Not “let’s put a 600px X 400px header with pictures of cartoon pandas wrestling with golden dragons”.

Your client doesn’t know what her final output would look like — not when she comes to you with the project, not when you show her your work in progress prototypes, and not when you give her 13 type and color choices. All she does know is how this final output is supposed to make her “emote”. Chances are, she doesn’t quite know what emotion she’s trying to evoke yet either.

How to talk client-ish (and design-ish)

For all practical purposes, the designer and the client are two different species. They do not talk the same language or share similar thought processes. In fact, they don’t even see the world around them in the same way. Physically, Design Hell is that vacuum that lies between the designer’s artistic world view and the client’s rudimentary expectations. Which brings us to the question — how do you bridge these two worlds?

Governing dynamics: The Inter-world portkey

If the only thing the client brings to the table is her emotional end goal, asking her for color choices upfront isn’t going to help much. Designers need to drive down to the fundamental basic desires of the client and drive upwards from there.

How? Just ask why.

I asked my sales guy “what” he meant by a sticky design. Terrible question. Instead, if I’d asked him “why”, chances are he’d have told me he wanted the design to have a super high level of recall. Why? Because he was going to hand these brochures at a show, which means he’d want people to go back to work 2 days later, and still remember the brochure. Makes sense.

Just asking a series of why’s brings both the designer and the client one step closer to sharing a common world view. Sure, it’s frustrating, but every why takes you closer from “stupid client” to “ah, that’s what she wants”.

“I want some cat pictures on my homepage”

“Why?”

“It makes the page feel more warm, and adds a fun element to it”

“Why?”

“Because it adds a personality to our site”

“Why?”

“Because we need a differentiator”

“Why?”

“Because our users are bored with 1000 other products that do pretty much exactly what we do”.

There you go. Now instead of breaking your client’s enthusiasm by telling them cat pictures on a website selling pressure pumps is stupid, you can actually focus your design thinking in identifying and putting the focus on their core differentiators. The client is happy, you don’t deliver a design that sucks, and the world is a brighter, nicer place.