“Bad clients lead to more bad clients… Doing good work for good clients will lead to more good clients!” — Michael Bierut
This morning I forced myself to get out-and-about very early for January’s CreativeMornings event hosted by Tina Roth Eisenberg, also know to bloggers and designers as Swissmiss, the “Swiss designer gone NYC”. Tina hosts the CreativeMornings breakfast lecture series each month right here in NYC but this month particularly interested me. The speaker was Michael Bierut, partner in Pentagram’s New York office.
Mr. Bierut gave an invigorating talk about clients. And we’re not just talking client horror stories, here. Today’s discussion touched on how clients can be the best part of the design process, what makes a client good or bad, how to effectively profile and work with clients, and finding the right designer/client fit. But given the current economic state and some very real issues I’ve been noticing, what really struck me about this point of discussion was the declaration that in order to do good work and continue getting the opportunity to do more good work, designers should only work on good projects with good clients.
As a freelancer who is fairly new on the scene, coming from a 9-5 full-time job, it is painfully obvious to me that right now many of the jobs I come across or am presented with are coming from a client who wants quality design work for their not-so-quality project from an educated graphic designer for one-third of that designer’s price. Because things are tough right now. I get it. But what most non-creative potential clients don’t seem to get is that this business of graphic design is our livelihood. Not only do we not want to spend our time doing bad work that will not represent us well in our portfolios; we especially don’t want to spend our time doing bad work for a fraction of the market value. And yet, given the economy and the current struggle to land any client, many designers may be considering taking on bad work for bad clients at whatever value!
Mr. Bierut advises against it. “Bad clients lead to more bad clients,” he says. “[And] doing good work for good clients will lead to more good clients!”
In other words, while it may be tempting to take on a crappy project for some extra cash, or even for a large paycheck, resist the urge. If you want to do good work and keep doing good work for the right kinds of clients, you need to avoid the crappy stuff — no matter what. There will never be an instance where a crappy job will lead to a good job. Crappy jobs only lead to more crappy jobs.
So it’s up to you: Do you want to be a designer who gets by doing crappy jobs, or do you want to be the kind of designer who is asked to speak at an event like CreativeMornings? The choice is yours. And I know the economy is making it difficult for us, but still: if you want to be doing good work, don’t succumb to the pressure to take on bad work just because work seems hard to come by right now. It will only hurt you in the long run.
“Five good clients,” says Mr. Bierut. All you need is five and you’ll be set for life. Do you have your five? If not, what are you waiting for? Go get them!
For more about CreativeMornings (which, by the way are free), visit creativemornings.com and for more about Tina Roth Eisenberg, visit swiss-miss.com. This month’s sponsors were Behance and Blurb, so a big Thank You goes out to them for helping to keep this event free for NYC’s graphic design community. For more on today’s speaker, Michael Bierut, and Pentagram, visit pentagram.com.
