How to avoid Captain Obvious

There’s a fine balance dealing with clients during the design process. You have to tread lightly between fulfilling potentially cliché ideas and asserting your expertise. I find this much more challenging than technical planning, as clients don’t have as much of their personal character reflected in how something is programmed. Any sort of creative process tends to hit closer to home for clients. Whether it’s because their regular jobs are routine and lack creativity, or because everyone has an inner designer just waiting to break free; it still has tremendous impact on the final design.

Way back when I was a client, I was tasked with helping our ad agency come up with tag lines for our brochures. I was a music geek who had a boring agriculture job and was milking my chance at any opportunity for creative work. I was naïve but not clueless. By the end, I submitted about ten suggestions for a tagline to accompany a photo of an old farmer talking to a golf-shirt toting rep. Sadly, my best one: “Quality you can trust”. The big boss man ended up forcing the agency to use this rice-cake flavoured title. Looking back, I can only imagine the frustration the professional copywriters and designers must have had using this extremely mild copy for their design. I wish that the agency would have taken me aside and explained how hackneyed my ideas were.

Bring them over to the dark side
I think you have to give clients a tiny glimpse into the dirty world of design; what’s overused, some common faux pas, and how they can avoid being the inside joke. Don’t be afraid to explain blasphemous design terms like: “Make the logo bigger”, collages, comic sans, etc. Once you’ve opened the door, their new sense of empowerment will allow them to look down upon cliché designs.

Outside of the basic education you can give your clients about design, here’s an exercise I’ve found helps the design process with clients to eliminate cliche ideas:

Show a photo
Something very typical. Something like a set of green apples, with one red one. Ask everyone to write a tag line of what quickly comes to their mind, in the first 20 seconds. This example should produce gems like:

• Stand out
• Be unique
• Differentiate yourself

Ok. Make this your black list. Too many ads are built on these types of sentences and never get results, because it’s exactly what everyone else would come up with. It’s expected.

It reminds me of a ad I saw in Calgary for a value-based beer. Instead of the traditional-brewed copy, this poster simply said: “You don’t want to see the bikini models we can afford”. The unexpected got noticed (and remembered).

Show a tagline
Something like: “Meet & Greet” or “A step in the right direction”. Have everyone write down a description of picture they envision to match this tagline. Chances are it will be a person climbing stairs, a close-up of a foot on a ladder, the dreaded handshake photo, and the like. Once again, this is your blacklist of photos.

This is a great eye-opener for clients who don’t normally work with creative design, and can help you get them thinking like your designers. This isn’t just to get them thinking of copy or photos, but rather gives clients a better understanding how much effort and talent it requires to produce successful creative output. I should also mention that clients vary in their design experience and it’s important to acknowledge this early on. So, hopefully when you try this with clients, it will result in a better working relationship during your next creative endeavour.

twitpitch: How to get your clients thinking like designers. @zutweets @albertjame has tips to enhance your next creative project