There is also a flipside where a designer has their own strong design opinions and these hurt the client. A friend of mine wanted a cool website for his new retail store. The guy he hired did a beautiful 100% Flash website. Unfortunately, his site doesn’t get indexed well on Google, his local competitors come up well before he does, and he can’t update it himself. He would have been better served with a nice CSS template and graphics on top of an easy to use CMS.

It definitely goes both ways. If a designer insists upon building a site that doesn’t take into account the client’s preferences, then you might end up with a beautiful site, but you very well could end up with a ticked off client.

This scenario is obviously not a good way to stay in business.

You have to keep it balanced…take the clients idea and put your designer’s touch on them. In the end you should have a site that is the best of both worlds.

I’m probably wrong to do so, but I’ve given up trying to save clients from themselves. I’m in business to make money, not start a mission for the taste-impaired. The amount of time I spend arguing with a client is time I could be earning money from another job, so if they order crap… I give them crap. On purpose. And they love it!

The fact I’ve come to face is that the global market has devalued art. Clients don’t *want* a timeless masterpiece; they want the same Web 2.0 glossy mirrored logo or Web 1.0 cheesy flashing gif they see everybody else having. I save the timeless masterpieces for my own site or portfolio.

Yes, burned out and cynical, that’s me!

However, if they insist, then by george, they get their smurf. Like you said, in the end we are just trying to get paid. The smurftastic site just never appears on our portfolios.

That would be an interesting question…what sites have you built that you refuse to put on your portfolio because your client is “aesthetically challenged”?

Its kind of a catch-22 because who wants to admit to creating a site with a sparkling, animated American flag? Still be funny to see that Zeldman had built something like that because a client insisted.

Heh heh, what sites have I made that weren’t my proudest moments? I’ve forgotten all of them, and the Internet has, too.

This spreads out beyond graphic design: Clients want you to use nonstandard proprietary HTML that only works in IE no matter how bad an idea you tell them that is. They insist on Meta-tag abuse because it fooled the search engines in 1998. They want the program in Visual Something, security be damned. And then there’s web startups that are an obviously bad business idea to begin with, but they just got a round of investor funding and if you don’t collect the money they’re shoveling around, they’ll just throw it away anyway…

I make the main bulk of my living from writing for the web, and clients there want Top Ten lists and SEO keyword soup no matter what. Even when I’ve convinced the client to see it my way, and as a result, they get to the front page of Digg or get a million search hits because they’re the only ones tapping a niche market, the next time we do business they want to go back to their old bad habits anyway.

In a nutshell, we have the same challenges you get in ANY branch of IT work, as I remember from my years as a cubicle gnome. The only difference is you now work for a million pointy-haired bosses instead of one. But you can quit easier.

I too have pretty much given up on trying to convince them otherwise. A client will almost always take something that they thought of over something given to them. Maybe its pride, maybe it stupidity, I really don’t care anymore.

At one time I thought I could talk them out of bad design by making business cases for good design. But then the client will inevitably twist their customer base to have the exact same preferences they have and if you persist they get upset that you think you know their client base better than they do.

At the end of the day I need to find my own widget to sell and create the best marketing material possible to sell the hell out of it because that’s the only way to create the designs you want to create. The I can afford my own designers and tell them how I want something to look and they can talk about how they’re trying to save me from myself.

And so it goes.

Of course, work is work so it is hard to turn down anything, but if a job is burning out the love you have for design, then in the long run it is best to sidestep them.

I feel for ya man. Good luck out there! Let me know if you need your own designer to boss around

David