Working With Decision Makers
When going through the design process, one of the things that make projects go a lot smoother is having the ability to work with decision makers of the particular company that are working for. The less layers of people that you have to go through to get approval and sign-off, the better a project can turn out.
This gets a whole lot hard with bigger companies. For some reason, once a design project starts, every in big companies turns into a designer. You have people trying to make decisions about design choices that should really should have no say in the matter. By the time everyone’s opinions combine, and the design gets up to the actual decision makers, the actual design goes through layers of abuse which are not always positive. This could have a major effect on the actual decision makers because they are getting explanations about your design from non-designers.
In a corporate setting, being able to work with top decision makers can be really tough, however, if designers had that ability, we would be able to further educate the people that really matter and explain our design choices. This is why, at Tridea, our focus is on small business. We want the chance to be as close to our clients as possible.
Not to say that working with small businesses will always be easy, however, working within a smaller environment, we have a better chance at being able to work with decisions makers and explain our design choices and why they would help out the company. It will also give us a chance to get a little more personable with the people that matter, instead of dealing with the hundreds of layers of people that don’t matter within a corporate environment.
In the case of freelancing and working with smaller clients, it is important to establish (at the beginning) who the decision makers will be throughout the whole design project. That way you can be in direct communication with them, and your design choices won’t come by surprise when you are able to work with them through the whole project.
2 Comments
I know exactly how this feels, John. It’s enough to make you cry when you do something really nice, and that you’re really pleased with then the client comes back and changes it all around. We’ve had enough people like that at our place. It de-motivates you as much as anything.
Hope things are going well Tridea, btw. Setting a company up and making it work can be so difficult, especially with the competition in the industry.
Steve, it is definitely one of the more frustrating things about the industry……non-designers making design decisions.
Tridea is doing well. We have our first two clients now so we hope to get a portfolio up very shortly.