Today the twittersphere has been driven to a bit of a furor over some of Jeff Croft’s recent twitterings. It appears that a colleaugue of his has recently been frustrated and even somewhat offended by a client.

Ever had a client take your design, “rework it” and send it back to you so you can do the rest of the site their way? How did you handle it? I don’t want to be someone’s pixel prostitute. If they want to push my pixels around, they can do it themselves, after I’m done. My job is to give them the best possible solution I can come up with. They don’t have to use it if they don’t want to. It’s work for hire. They hire us, we do our best, we give it to them. PERIOD. If they want to redesign it AFTER that, fine.

I can certainly feel the pain and only years of making mistakes has helped me find ways to avoid that sort of situation. It’s good to see that his design bud’s have his back but I do think we designers can get a bit snooty about these situations at times. Especially when it comes to our work.

Here is the response I left on Bryan Veloso’s blog, Avalon Star:

This reminds me a lot of the ‘93 interview with Steve Jobs discussing Paul Rand’s work. Steve asked Paul to provide them some option. Paul responded with:

No. I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people...you can use it or not, but you will pay me.

A great interview all around.

I also think Zeldman had some great points during his presentation on Selling Design at An Event Apart ‘07 in San Francisco. There is a certain amount of legwork that has to happen upfront before you can really engage with a client. You have to establish a certain amount of trust with the client and make sure that there are no unclear assumptions about the project.

Assuming you’ve done all this and a client still does what they did to Croft’s unfortunate colleage—after your through throwing your computer through the screen of course—you have to assess what it is that client is asking. We have to put aside our feelings and think about what the goal is that the client is trying to accomplish by sending you a grossly disfigured copy of your work.

Does he simply not understand or respect the process? Or is it something else? Are you not meeting some unknown criteria that the client hasn’t made apparent? Are they unhappy with something? Sometimes it really helps to go back to the basics and do a gutcheck.

I also think a lot of this is can be avoided if you walk a client through your work. The client obviously doesn’t know everything we designers implicitly understand. They don’t know why Garamond is the proper choice and Comic Sans is not. So whenever we send work to them we should always be sure to take the time to show them why we did what we did and how it is making them successful. Just because we’ve already signed a contract doesn’t mean we’re done selling.

Of course, sometimes the client is just the wrong client and you find out too late.  It’s unfortunate but obviously it happens more than we’d like. All we can do is hold our heads high, be the better man and exit stage left as swiftly as possible.

I hope everything turns out well. I truly feel the pain of a fellow designer’s frustration. We got your back.