Design Is a Job

A DESIGNER GATHERS INFORMATION

Who are we designing for? How will they use what we are designing? Do they need it? What backend technologies does the client have at their disposal? What new ones are they open to trying? Who else has tried this and how have they succeeded or failed?

Once you have design goals you need to gather as much information as possible to make sure you are designing a solution that will fulfill those goals. You simply cannot design without researching the landscape. Just like you can’t build a house without surveying the land.

A DESIGNER TALKS TO CLIENTS AND STAKEHOLDERS

No matter how good the work is, if you can’t sell it you haven’t finished the job. I can’t stress how important this is. (I go on at length about this in a later chapter.) I’ve run into quite a few designers who left this job to someone else, be it a client rep or an art director. I’ve also seen my share of studios where the designer wasn’t given the opportunity to sell their own work, which is amazingly shortsighted

That’s the first step to designing anything: ask “Why are we doing this?” If the answer isn’t clear, or isn’t clear to you, or just doesn’t exist, you can’t design anything. Stop working.

Selling your work directly to clients is extremely important. Not only should you be able to explain why you made the decisions you did, but you’ll get first-hand feedback on where the work needs to go next.

Once you are ready to take the responsibility for selling your work (and I am very purposefully using the word “selling,” not “presenting”) then you can begin to call yourself a designer. And get the credit for the good work you do

Your toolbox should contain tools for input (goals and research), activity (make things!), and output (sell those things!). A designer’s work starts way before a single pixel gets placed and ends way after the last one is locked in place. You may not take the lead in every, or even any part of the process; throughout your career you’ll work on small teams, big teams, and sometimes alone. But even when you don’t own a particular process, make sure to (respectfully) insert yourself. The more you know, the better your work will be. And don’t wait to be asked.

How to get referrals

Most referrals come from colleagues or friends of colleagues, friends, or past clients. The keys to getting those referrals are:

Be pleasant to work with. Do good work

We once received a call from a gentlemen who said, “[redacted] referred me to you. He said that you wouldn’t be shy about telling me I was wrong, you’d probably piss me off, and that I should listen to everything you said because it would work.”

I was delighted.

That said, you should aim to be pleasant to work with, as everyone would rather work with someone pleasant than with an asshole. But no one wants to work with someone who’s faking it. Doing good work often requires a few hard conversations.

There’s a difference between being enjoyable to work with and being “nice.” Being nice means worrying about keeping up the appearance of harmony at the expense of being straightforward and fully engaged. Sometimes you need to tell a client they’re making the wrong call. Part of client services is being able to do that without coming off as a dick. But being afraid to do it because you’re too invested in being “nice” is worse than being a dick.

You need to be able to explain what you do very succinctly and in an interesting manner. Everyone hates being cornered at a party by the guy who drones on about his work.

But if you sound really excited and confident about what you do when someone inquires in a perfunctory manner at a baby shower—and then you shut up—the person you are talking to might actually remember and recommend you when the occasion arises. This actually happens all the time

Say you wake up tomorrow morning with a weird pain in your knee (probably from doing laps at 4 a.m.). You’ll make a mental run through your address book until you think of a friend who had knee problems last year. The next time you see her you’ll ask her about the doctor who treated her, and after confirming she’s not walking with a limp, you’ll get that doctor’s number. Now you not only have a doctor in mind, but you’ve gone from wondering if you can find a good doctor to hoping this particular doctor has an opening for you. All because of the wonderfully transitive properties of trust.

Get to know the people on the client team and treat them well. Make them a valuable part of the project and make sure their voices get heard. People change jobs. If the current project goes well, the person who hired you will have her stock rise within the company, and the rest of the staff will eventually spread out far and wide to other companies who will need design services at some point

To do this design thing right we’re going to have to redefine what we think of as “our work.” That stuff in your portfolio? That’s just evidence of work. The real work is that plus all the conversations, decisions, and convincing you did along the way

If you are not a networking natural, try a user-centered approach, just like in design. Whenever you meet someone, start by learning something about them. Try to find out just a bit about what interests and motivates them. Try to think of something you could do to help them, whether it’s validating their needs and interests or providing some useful information. Then when you talk about what you do, and what you need, just put it in that context.

Don’t be afraid to ask people you know for recommendations and referrals. Knowing someone to recommend is very exciting for people. Whether it’s being thought of as karma or scoring business points, people love giving out referrals when they truly believe the person they’re recommending is solid and trustworthy

A very wise (and handsome) man once told me, “No one’s going to know what you think about unless you write and publish your opinions.” I was incredibly shy and insecure about my writing when he said that. (Here’s a secret: you don’t get over it. You push through it.) Yet I knew that for the sake of my business I had to take that advice to heart. And you should too. People need to know who you are so they can write you checks. Write! Design! Put yourself out there. Let history decide whether it’s crap or not.

Maintaining a relationship is not hard. (If my therapist is reading this I just screwed myself.) You’re both busy people with sites to build and lives to live, so don’t reach out with chores for them to do. Send the occasional email, or make the occasional phone call, to just say hello. Check in briefly. If their company just did something awesome send them an email, mention it on Twitter, and congratulate them publicly. Maybe once in a blue moon make plans for a drink or a meal. And yes, make sure to tell them you’re always on the lookout for any referrals they can send your way, but don’t make that the central point of conversation.

The other problem with RFPs is that they can be overly prescriptive in nature. They can include specific solutions that may or may not be appropriate. This is usually an indication that the organization is freaked out about having to hire designers and is trying to maintain as much control as possible—to the point where they’re going into as much detail as possible and short-circuiting the entire design process. You may be able to help them through that.

If an RFP starts dictating button colors, pick up the phone. It’s a cry for help and your opportunity to create mutual understanding. Speaking directly to a designer may be what they need, much more than getting 325 replies to a badly-formed RFP. Remember, not all organizations who send out formal documents have to.

That said, if there’s a client you’re really interested in working with, go after them. Your best bet, as always, is going in through your network. Someone you know will know someone at that organization. Get ready to buy some meals and drinks. This is a little like that game where you start off with a paperclip and have to trade your way up to a dream client in ten moves or less. But with a little luck you may be able to get in front of the right people. More likely than not you’ll be making a pitch to be considered should they have design needs in the future, so make a lasting impression

We were once asked to co-sponsor a party at SXSW. I believe it was about three or four grand to get our name on the banner outside the bar and a listing in the program. We didn’t have a spare three or four grand sitting around at the time. Instead we got stickers with our logo on them. Cost: $50. (It helps that our logo is an animal. People like animals.) We went to the party and gave everyone a sticker. People got drunk, put stickers on each other, took pictures, and uploaded them to the internet. You know how people referred to that party? The Mule party

Chapter 3: Choosing the Right Clients

DO THEY UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE?

“Don’t worry. We know exactly what we need.”

Beware of clients who have waited to call you until they have a perfect diagram of what they need and want you to color it in. If they’re not coming to you for strategy and problem-solving, they’re not coming to you for design, they’re coming to you for production. And if you take on production work, you don’t get to call yourself a designer.

“You know, we’ve got some really big name agencies who’d love to get this job.” Great, go call them. Don’t work for someone who tries to make you feel they’re lowering themselves to work with you, even as a negotiation tactic. Good work comes from mutual respect.

Beware of clients who want you to work for equity or other things that can’t be easily converted into rent. There’s too much there beyond your control. And especially beware of clients who tell you the work you do together will look great in your portfolio. For one, it probably won’t. A client who asks you to work for less than market rates already disrespects you. How do you think that’ll play out during the project? Think you’re getting portfolio-level work out of that? Secondly, you’re in business to make money. I’m lucky enough that I get to do what I love, but only because I can make a living off of it

Never work for free. Any work you take on for free will get pushed aside for paying work. That does neither you nor the client any favors. Neither of you will respect each other’s time. If the situation merits it, work at a discounted rate. But submit a budget showing the actual rate, with the discount applied

Watch out for clients who don’t understand the financial value of what they’re hiring you for. In ninety-five percent of the jobs we’ve taken on, our clients have met or exceeded their success metrics after our work was done. Can we take full credit for that? Sure! Well, no, probably not, but it’s safe to say we were definitely a part of it. Design, done right, is not a loss on the balance sheet and should not be bought or sold as one. Design is an investment in infrastructure and keeps the wheels of business running smoothly. Good design equals a more effective product or service. Design equals profit!

Clients will always ask you to make their logo bigger, prescribe solutions, and ask you to do things that will make you smack your forehead. You can roll your eyes at how much they don’t understand about design or you can roll up your sleeves and begin practicing your craft by helping them clarify what they need.

It’s your job as a designer, and a communication professional, to find the right language to communicate with your client. When you say a client doesn’t “get it” you might as well be saying, “I couldn’t figure out how to get my point across. I am a lazy designer. Please take all my clients from me.”

But as a designer, hell, as any type of craftsperson, you are responsible for what you put into the world. You are defined by the clients you take on, and you can only stand as proud of the work as its benefit to society entitles you to.

I urge each and every one of you to seek out projects that leave the world a better place than you found it. We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that

Chapter 4: Charging for Your Work

“But it’ll only take me an hour!”

Good for you! That should be a highly profitable job.

Don’t punish yourself for being good or efficient. I’ve seen designers pull their hair out trying to solve something and I’ve seen designers nail something on the first try. Quite often these were the same designers on consecutive days. In either situation, what the client pays for is that solution, not the time it took you to get there. If it should take you less time than what was estimated and agreed to, and that estimate was created honestly based on previous similar work: great.

as soon as a client calls we try to give them what we call a “700 level ballpark figure.” Meaning, we can’t see too much of the detail on the field yet, but it sounds like it’s an $80–$120K project. As we gain insight into the project we’ll start getting more precise with that figure and communicate that with them so that by the time they get a proposal in front of them it’s a figure they’ll be prepared for.

If a potential client is going to have sticker shock, get it over with as soon as possible. Before you’ve taken the time to put together a proposal.

Here is a short list of terrible surprises to avoid, just to give you an idea:

Copywriting Backend development Localization Video production and motion graphics Custom illustration Content migration Print collateral CMS customization SEO Maintenance

Having to negotiate your price isn’t a sign that something went wrong—it’s a sign that something went right.

You will know you charged too little if the client agrees right away

Get comfortable saying, “No.” Go stand in front of a mirror right now. C’mon. Let’s do it together. “No. This is my price. This is what it costs to work with me.”

You will lose work. But you will also feel better about the work you get. You may even get a reputation as a hard-ass. I can tell you from personal experience, it’s not the end of the world

charge as much as you can, deliver an honest value, and never work for free

Let’s start by going over a short list of people who are not uncomfortable with money: your landlord, your utility companies, your insurance agent, your grocer, your tailor (yes, you should have one), and your doctor. If you have kids, let’s add their orthodontist and the bursar at their eventual college of choice to the list. Money is so necessary to the fabric of society that even my friends in Berkeley have a secret guilty stash of it.

You are not doing design, you are selling design, which is a valuable service

As with all parts of the job, confidence begets confidence, and it’s even more so with money. No one wants to hand money to someone who behaves like they don’t deserve it, or has no idea what to do with it.

My friend Anil Dash once said that if you hand a client an estimate and slap them across the face and they complain about the slap, then the estimate wasn’t high enough.

You can always negotiate down from a price that was too high, but you can’t recover from a price that was too low. You’re stuck with that. There is nothing wrong with trying to get the highest price for your work.

The Kickstart founders spent years working with NGOs who donated equipment and tools to those in need, only to return to the scene and find that the equipment had been scavenged for parts or was sitting unused and rusting away. People didn’t value (or need) what they had been given. So Kickstart decided to sell their pumps, marketing them as the “Super MoneyMaker.” The results were impressive. Instead of free hand-outs, the Super MoneyMaker became an item the poorest people in the world would save up for. Only people who actually planned to use one would buy one. When you pay for something with your own money, you value it more than when you get it for free. You take care of it. Most telling, people would scavenge from other things to repair their Super MoneyMakers.

Calling a bunch of design firms and getting a range of prices that don’t resemble each other has got to make you feel like people are just making this shit up. Which they are.

There is always someone cheaper. Negotiate price, but don’t compete on price. Compete on quality, value, and fit.

You should, of course, know the minimum rate you need to make to keep the lights on. But you should be charging clients based on what that work is worth to them, not the time it takes you to complete it

Only you know the value of your time. (Hint: it is greater than $0.) But the value of your work to a particular client depends on what the client has to gain from that work. And the client is not buying time from you. They are buying work. The value of that work is what you need to charge them for.

Most clients will approach you with a wish list of desires. If they don’t you should actually work with them on coming up with one. Assign a cost and a benefit to each one. Then figure out which ones are crucial to the project and which ones would be nice to have. Figure out which ones actually fit into their overall goals. Not only will this help you come up with a proper scope, but it’ll give you a handy list of priorities should you need to adjust the budget.

When your mechanic presents you with a bill, you may cringe; but when he goes over the itemized list you begin to see how that figure got there, and you see the care and concern that went into preparing that number. It also doesn’t occur to you to talk your mechanic down because you can see that each part has a cost. Your job is to treat your time and expertise as if it has that same set cost.

We’ve also found that delivering a chart of all the steps necessary to the site launch with a column for what we’re responsible for and what they’re responsible for is a good way to find out what services the client may not even be aware they need.

The flip side of that, of course, is that you can’t charge the client for the time it takes you to learn a particular tool. If a client hired you to build something in a platform you don’t know yet but feel confident you can learn, the time it takes you to pick up that expertise is on you. Once you consider yourself capable, turn the meter on.

The moral of this story is that small jobs contain the same kinds of problems as big jobs, minus the budget and the time to deal with them adequately. You’ll try to squeeze them into as little time as possible and they don’t want to be squeezed. Remember, a small job for you is not necessarily a small job for the client. And while you may be thinking that this is a little something you can squeeze in between big projects, the client is still expecting the same amount of detailed attention you’re giving your bigger projects. And they’d be right to expect that.

It’s perfectly fine to summarize what is included and what isn’t for reference. Another way to handle this is to list everything that needs to be done on the project and who is responsible for it, whether it is you, the client, or a third (even as-yet-unnamed) party. You compile this list by means of a phone call or in-person conversation in which you go through the list of everything that you anticipate will need to be done and ask the client who they would like to be responsible for that work. Everything you are responsible for goes into your estimate. Everything you aren’t responsible for goes on a list of scope exclusions.

Don’t ever leave a proposal on its own. A proposal is a prop for a sales presentation. If at all possible, get yourself in front of the client’s decision-makers and sell. Everything you learned while preparing the proposal should be at your disposal. Read the room. Go over as much or as little detail as the room requires. Make sure you go over key benefits of the proposal. You don’t sell features, you build features. You sell benefits. You are convincing them to hire you, not accept your proposal. The proposal is merely one data point toward that decision. Your presentation skills will decide how big a data point it is.

I love it when a client asks this question. You will learn to love it as well. First off, congratulations on having the confidence to bid high but not too high! Second, your high bid did not scare off the client. Furthermore, you’re being presented with an excellent opportunity to further sell yourself. The client is asking you to close the deal.

You need to sound confident as hell that not only did you bid correctly, but that you are the best possible fit for this job. And by going into detail about how you got to that price, you can show them that you have a detailed understanding of what it will take to get that job done. Which, by the way, you better have.

You want a client to feel like your time and expertise are valuable, that you’re right for the job, and that it may take a little work on everybody’s part to make this happen. Once a client has decided to put effort into working together, they have skin in the game and it’s in their best interest to get it to work

If the client wants the price lowered, go over all the items in the proposal and find out what can be cut. Never lower the price without taking something away. And never take something away without explaining the lost benefit

And when I talk about things to cut I am talking about the amount of stuff the client will have delivered to them, i.e., site features. You can’t cut parts of your process that you need to do the job. The answer to “Can we take out this research?” is always no.

Remember, the client wouldn’t be negotiating with you if they didn’t already want to work with you. So negotiate from a place of confidence. That means being okay with not getting the job. Confidence doesn’t come from knowing you’re right—it comes from being okay with failing

The secrets to getting the price you want for your work are having done the homework to know you’re asking for the right thing, the confidence to ask for it, and the willingness to walk away when you can’t get it. Now that I think of it, I just accidentally gave you the secret to life, which I was saving for another book.

WHY A CONTRACT?

A contract establishes the nature of the relationship between all parties and makes the important stuff clear to everyone involved:

What are the ground rules for working together? How much money is exchanged and at what point? What are the deliverables, and when are they due? What happens if there is a delay? Who has what rights? What rights does the client get and when? Which do you retain? And very importantly, a contract states what should happen if everything goes to hell. No one goes into a relationship with the intention to screw the other party, but things happen.

There’s nothing wrong with letting your lawyer and the client’s lawyer settle small contract disputes directly. It usually saves a lot of time. Heck, they probably went to school together. But never, ever, and I mean never talk to a client’s lawyer directly without yours present. Only lawyers talk to other lawyers. Sometimes negotiating a very large project requires a friendly conference call with everyone and their lawyers. You can accomplish in one hour what might take days exchanging tracked changes.

We’ve been on conference calls with clients and found out their lawyers were, unexpectedly to us, on the call as well. So we calmly stated, “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to reschedule this call when our lawyer is available as well.

Some of the essential terms—like the estimated price and key deliverables—get fleshed out as you negotiate the statement of work with your client. However, a lot of gray areas may appear during this process.

For example, what does “payment due upon completion” really mean? What is “completion”? Things get ugly at the end when everyone involved doesn’t have a clear shared idea of what constitutes “done.” Does it mean that the website is live? Or when you deliver Photoshop files of the final design? When the client is subjectively satisfied with your work? Does the client need to send you written approval?

Settle the terms of the relationship first and save the arguments for the design.

Your lawyer is there to help you make sure you’re in the best possible position to help your clients without putting yourself in a bad spot. Your lawyer is a defensive asset and not to be weaponized unless absolutely necessary. If you have a lawyer who is turning everything into a fight, then it’s time for a conversation, or a new lawyer

Intellectual property (IP) transfers on full payment

This simple little idea protects you from doing the work and getting shafted. Basically, it means that even though the work may be sitting on your clients’ server, until they’ve paid you for it, it belongs to you

A termination fee protects you from walking away empty-handed should a client kill the job for reasons that are out of your control. The kill fee should cover the resources you’ve allotted to this particular client and the fact that you’re not out looking for work because you’ve committed your time to this project

While you certainly design for success, and test accordingly, you simply cannot guarantee that a design will meet goals. It’s like asking a college to guarantee that getting a degree from them will get you a good job. A client once asked me for a guarantee and I told him I’d give him one if we could add a bonus clause to the contract should the goals be met. That was the end of that conversation.

The particular land mine I’m talking about is informal projects with friends. The sort of stuff you feel funny about asking a contract for. I’d tell you to avoid these projects, but you’ll just ignore me, because, let’s face it, you’d feel like a giant jerk asking your buddy to sign a contract to design a few pages or make a logo for his pet project. Until your buddy sells his pet project. Now we have tension. And as bad as it is to have tension in a client relationship, it’s ten times worse when a friendship is also on the line.

If you insist on doing these projects, at the very least have a conversation about possible outcomes and detail your decisions in an email to each other. That may be a bit uncomfortable (although it certainly doesn’t have to be) but it may ultimately save a friendship

Chapter 6: Sticking to Your Process

And as I’m telling them all this, I’m kissing the job goodbye. Which sucks, because it was a really good job, and I really wanted to do it. But the only way I could do it was if they understood and respected our process. And if you think it took guts to tell someone this, then I wish I’d had them that day, because I was totally freaked out and scared. But you have to do the right thing because it’s the right thing, scared or not.

“That all makes a lot of sense. You’re hired.”

You need to sell. When a client hires you they are hiring your process as well, but you need to sell them on that process as the reason you do good work. And that needs to be done as part of the hiring process, not after.

“If we’re going to work together, here’s how it’s going to work.”

You’re not going to ask for permission to do things your way. You’re going to convince clients that your way works by showing them how you will use your process to meet their goals. And you’ll back this up by showing them how many times it’s worked in the past. And every time you manage to do this you’ll have yet one more example to make your case

HOW COMPANIES ATTEMPT TO BREAK YOUR PROCESS

A short selection of popular favorites.

Start drawing (solving) before you fully understand the problem

This is a no. The anxiety here comes from a basic misunderstanding that they hired you to design and design is pictures. They’re not sure why you’re doing this other stuff. And if you’ve ever walked into a visual presentation and said, “Today we’re finally going to look at design!” you’re part of the reason this problem exists, so stop blaming your clients

often describe it as building the roof of the house first and then letting it sit until we go back and build the walls.

I hate starting with the home page. However, I’ve found that until clients see it we can’t get their attention on anything else. So, we give them a home page. And while they debate its merits we get cranking on the rest of the site. We bend, but we don’t break.

The second most common instance is clients developing competing visuals. That’s a deal breaker. Never put yourself in a situation where you’re competing to solve a problem you’ve been entrusted to solve. Plus, you need the room to try things that may or may not be right without the cavalry being called in.

I love competing to get work, but once I get it, it’s mine. The competition is over.

But certain things will take the time they will take. The popular saying is that you can’t throw nine women at a baby and get it in a month. (I have tried this, and it is true!) Rushing leads to stupid mistakes, like launching a site filled with lorem ipsum (not that anyone’s ever done that of course). What’s worth doing is worth doing well, and even while working in an urgent manner, details must be looked after and quality needs to stay at a high level.

And I guarantee you that the client who wants to rush the most is the same one that spent a month or more waffling to sign the job.

Nothing derails a project faster than waffling over decisions, whether it’s taking too long to make a decision, or revisiting decisions that have already been acted on. You either have a team sitting on their hands waiting, or a team working backward to unravel what they’ve made.

You can protect yourself against this by making sure your client understands the repercussions of waffling. Everything on a project has a cost associated with it. Be it time or money or both. Clients hate wasting time and money, and in many cases don’t have the resources or authority to get more of either. So when asking them to make a decision, make sure to also tell them the cost associated with it.

We told them that if we were just to do some quick sketches, without the benefit of discussion and research, the ideas would inevitably be wrong. We’d never be able to guess what was in the clients’ heads. And we wouldn’t put ourselves in a position where we’d be judged on our mind-reading prowess.

Your process is what enables you to do good work. You’ll develop and tweak it throughout your entire career. Sometimes because you’ve learned something new, sometimes because the industry evolves and you need to reflect as much. But it will be the framework you will use to do your work.

As we tell potential clients when they ask us what their site will look like: “Oh, we have no damn idea. But we know what the process is for finding out.”

Planning how to achieve a goal needs to be something you take charge of. That’s your job. And unless you show the client that you are taking charge of that you’re going to have a very hard time getting anything done during the project.

In this particular case, I addressed the client’s goal by ensuring that they’d get good work because we had a process for getting good work done. I addressed their actual concern. And presented my own plan. And they were open-minded enough to listen to it, and I managed to convince them their goals would be better met with my plan than theirs

You need to start every project with an explanation of what designing something looks like. And how all the pieces fit together. And the minute you start putting “pictures” in front of people, you’re going to have to address their reactions to those pictures. Don’t put yourself in a position where you have to defend either your own work or their reaction to it before you have the research to know whether it’s right or wrong

You know what the least important page of a website is? The home page. More likely than not it’s a one-off template, it doesn’t expose enough of the navigational system, and quite often it’s more controlled by the needs of marketing than the site’s users.

The most common instance of this, by far, is “We’ve already done a lot of research. So we can just hand it to you and skip that whole phase.” And yes, seeing that research will be helpful, but it doesn’t take the place of us having to do our own. The point isn’t to do research—it’s to understand. It’s not a checklist item that we’re happy to allow someone else to cross off.

You can do a lot to show a client how valuable time is in how you comport yourself throughout the project. Run your meetings and work sessions efficiently. Come in prepared. Don’t run over. Don’t hang out. Don’t train clients to think you’ve got extra time on your hands.

A lot of organizational politics are a consequence of people not feeling heard. This is why you should aim to include as may people as possible in kickoff meetings. Even if they’re ultimately not part of the project team, give them an opportunity to be heard. You’ll find out useful information that your main contact might have assumed you didn’t need to know. You can also learn a lot from who your contact attempts to omit from such meetings.

As a designer it’s your job to differentiate between innovation and a trend. And to get your client to strive for the former while ignoring the latter. You can usually do this by pointing them to the last big trend that’s just started backfiring and enjoying a moment of awkward laughter together.

Chapter 7: Presenting Design

As a designer, you need to become adept at interpreting what a client actually means. You need to be there to ask clarifying questions. You need to manage the presentation process as carefully as you make the work.

This also applies to work that’s not being presented in person. If you’re working with a long-distance client, set up a phone call so that you can present the work and the rationale. And don’t send the work in advance. Reveal it during the call, after you’ve had the opportunity to set the stage properly. The last thing you want is clients getting ahead of you and starting a call with their list of proposed changes before you’ve had a chance to present

Before you ever get in a room with a client, let them know why you’re getting in that room. (If you’re not sure why you’re meeting, then maybe there’s no reason to meet.) Make sure everyone is walking in with the same expectations and knows what’s expected of them. Also, let them know how long the presentation is scheduled for, and give them the desired outcome.

A meeting without an agenda is an invitation for everyone to bring their pet issues. After all, you can’t really stray off course if no course has been set.

Put your audience at ease by letting them know that they’re exactly the right people to have in the room, and what you need from them is their expertise with the product or service, not design knowledge.

Steer the discussion away from personal subjectivity by outlining good topics of feedback: how well the proposed solutions meet specific metrics, whether their voice and brand are coming through, etc. Encourage them to stay in their own zone of expertise and they won’t attempt to hop on yours.

Never apologize for what you’re not showing. By the time you’re presenting, you should be focused on presenting what you have, not making excuses for what you don’t. And you need to believe what you’re saying to convince the client of the same. If you think the work is on the way to meeting their goals then say that. Design is an iterative process, done with a client’s proper involvement at key points. The goal isn’t always to present finished work; it’s to present work at the right time.

SPEAK TO GOALS, NOT FEATURES

Your review of the work should be goal-driven. And prioritized. The client had major goals with this project. They’ll be anxious to see how those goals are addressed. Go there first, and do it in a way that maps to their goal and not to your manifestation of the goal

“Here’s a Twitter button!” is bad.

“As you can see, we’ve addressed your social media concerns!” is better.

“We’ve placed social media sharing tools in places alongside the article where testing shows the reader is most likely to interact with them, and designed that space so that it’s flexible enough to add and subtract services as they rise and fall from prominence,” is the best of all.

Remember that every feature is there for a reason. Lead with the reason. And if you don’t have a good reason why it’s there, that’s probably a sign it’s not needed.

If you start with the declaration that you’re accommodating the social media strategy, there’s a lot less resistance because you’ll be showing that every visual element is in a particular place for a reason. Otherwise it just sounds like you’re dropping buttons in random spots.

Let them know that negative feedback is an essential part of the process and a part of the client’s job. We prefer constructive and well-reasoned negative feedback, but even an outburst of “Never show me that crap again!” saves everyone a lot of time.

At the beginning of every visual design presentation, particularly in the early stages, we give a little speech, some variation of, “Today, we are going to show you some things that may not be right. If you see something that isn’t working, you need to point it out. If you don’t tell us what you think isn’t working, we will show you the same thing again and again until we are out of time and money and you are stuck with it.”

Always present with a united front. No matter how much arguing there might have been back at the office, by the time you’re in front of a client, every solution you’re presenting is a team solution. Should a client propose something similar to what had been shot down internally earlier in the week, anyone who screams, “That’s what I wanted!” gets punched in the neck then and there.

Of course I’m kidding. No punching until you’re back in the office.

END STRONG

End on time. Respect your client’s time and show them that yours is valuable as well.

Make sure everyone’s questions have been answered. And make sure they have an avenue for feedback, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter, as well as a deadline. Thank them for their time. Shake hands and offer to take your glass to the sink. They’ll tell you to leave it, but offer anyway. Your mother raised you well.

My advice to you when you finish the presentation is to thank everyone for their time. Shut your mouth. Pack up your laptop. Head out of the building. Walk out the front door. Around the corner. In the car. Across the bridge. Okay, now you can talk.

Or, just make it a habit never to speak ill of your clients. They’re paying your bills. And putting their livelihood in your hands. They’re good people.

A DESIGNER WHO does not present his or her own work is not a designer. Presenting the work, explaining the rationale, answering questions, and eliciting feedback are part of the design toolkit. If you sit at your desk while someone else presents work to the client, you don’t get to complain about the feedback. The failure was yours.

There is no substitute for learning how to present design other than presenting design. Be nervous. No one ever died from a poor presentation. At some point you’ll realize that your nerves are lying to you. The evidence that you can present design will grow too large to ignore. You’ll do it again and again, and one day you’ll realize that you’re not as terrified as you used to be. Stay there. You’re actually designing from that point forward.

The biggest myth ever perpetuated in the design field is that good design sells itself. (The second is that Copperplate is a legitimate typeface.) Design can’t speak for itself any more than a tamale can take off its own husk. You’re presenting a solution to a business problem, and you’re presenting it as an advocate for the end users. The client needs to know that you’ve studied the problem, understood its complexities, and that you’re working from that understanding.

Stop trying to get your clients to “understand design” and instead show them that you understand what they hired you to do. Explain how the choices you’ve made lead to a successful project. This isn’t magic, it’s math. Show your work. Don’t hope someone “gets it,” and don’t blame them if they don’t—convince them.

Ultimately, your job is to make the client feel confident in the design. Confidence is as much of a deliverable as anything you’re handing over in the project.

When clients are speaking to you through an intermediary you’re not hearing directly from them. You can’t see their face. That’s important. Quite often the look on their face will tell you much more than the words out of their mouth.

Don’t waste a client’s time walking them through what they can already see. Your job is to explain how what they’re looking at is the best way to achieve their goals.

let’s say we just did our first visual concept presentation for a website. If we did it right, then the comps we showed were loose and sketchy and focused on tone, not specific functionality. And they were probably done before site architecture was finalized. The last thing we want is a lot of feedback about missing functionality. So the feedback guidelines might say:

Focus on:

Overall tone (Does this site feel like your company?) Voice (Is it using language the right way? Is it friendly? Authoritative? Trustworthy?) Structure (Too dense? Not dense enough?) Ignore:

Specific labels and body copy (Why is everything in Latin?) Missing elements (Where’s my newsletter signup?) Things we did not show you (I have comments about the company history page.) It’s also a good idea to address personal preferences before any feedback is given, rather than after, at which point you risk making people feel dumb for liking green, which although not the right color for this project, is a very lovely color in and of itself.

The longer clients are taking to get you feedback, the more likely that they’re not just pointing out issues, but working out solutions. You, or your project manager, need to get them on the phone. Ask them if they need your team’s help with anything. Remind them to come back with questions, and not solutions. That usually goes a little something like this:

“What’s up with our feedback, Bob?”

“We’re not happy with global nav, but we’re not sure how to fix it.”

“Well, just tell us why you’re not happy with it. We’ll come up with something. That’s why you’re paying us, Bob.”

“That’d be swell. Cause we’re stumped.”

Most clients try to fix things because they believe it’s the right thing to do. And unless you tell them it’s not you have no one to blame but yourself

Relax. It’s important that you’re relaxed when reading client feedback. Open your mind to the possibilities that you might be going on a journey. Client feedback has a way of taking you to places you never dreamed you’d go. But, honestly, remember two very important things:

You’re both working toward the same goal with the best of intentions. Most clients haven’t been trained in how to give feedback. (Well, except by you.)

On the other hand, suppose the client delivers their feedback in the form of a totally different comp than the one you presented. “We were hoping for something more like this.”

More often than not, this happens when there’s an internal designer on the client team who’s not happy about outside help being brought in. Put yourself in their shoes. You might even do the same thing. Don’t.

Work with your client to establish a feedback cycle that works for both of you. At Mule, we generally like getting feedback no more than forty-eight hours after a presentation so we don’t lose momentum. Some companies have too many stakeholders to make this possible, so neither should you require it, nor should they agree to it in that case. You’d both be setting yourselves up to fail. Come to a good compromise. But make sure they understand that more time for feedback means the project completion date moves back as well

Either way, document the agreed-upon feedback cycle in writing and put it in the Statement of Work. It’s a deadline, subject to the typical accolades that come from meeting a deadline and remonstrations that come with missing one

Going into a project, you need to know who on the client side provides input, who gives feedback, and who approves. You may have a better idea of who these people should be than your client

The general rule is to involve as many people as possible in early discussions, and make that number as small as possible once you go into review cycles. Often, people on the client side say they want to remain involved, but really just want to tell you the one thing they care about and then get back to their day job. If they don’t get to tell you that one thing, then they will pop up at the end of the project all bent out of shape.

Most clients tend to feel self-conscious about voicing their opinion about design. How often have you heard, “I don’t know anything about design!” That’s fine; they don’t have to. What they do know something about, however, is their business, and what you’re actually looking for here is business feedback. You need to know whether the design work is meeting the business goals of the project. You say “design,” and clients hear “art,” and now everyone’s uncomfortable. Act like the design expert the client hired; remind them—if need be—that they hired a design expert, and their job is to be the business experts. Keep them in their comfort zone and they’re less likely to come back with feedback from a family member who’s got “a good sense of design.”

We prepare feedback guidelines for the client before presentations. We tell them what’s helpful to talk about and what’s not. They’re thankful for the guidance and it saves them a lot of time. Clients love it when you save them time. We tell them what decisions are relevant at this point, what to ignore, and what may require further clarification. We also reiterate key points made during the presentation so they don’t forget

You need to start holding this line during presentations, as clients jump in with suggestions on things they’re not happy about. Impromptu prescriptive work sessions during presentations can eat up a lot of time, and put you in the awkward spot of having to tell clients that their suggestions may not be very good. So let them know ahead of time, “If something isn’t working, tell us why and we’ll fix it. We want to earn our money.” Remind them again in the written guidelines.

You don’t want to put yourself in a position of carrying out your client’s design decisions. If you allow them to start designing for you, you have no one to blame but yourself. If they insist on prescriptive feedback it’s time for an account-level conversation. Anyone who hires you because they thought you could do the job and then doesn’t let you do it has lost respect for either you or the design process.

Your first job is to separate the actionable feedback from the non-actionable feedback. Sometimes clients just like to document their thought process. Your job is to sift through and find the actionable from the non-actionable.

Start by thanking your client for the feedback. Go over the no-brainer list. That’s a quick win. Mention any particularly good suggestions they made. You need to build up some goodwill for what’s coming

With one exception: tackle the elephant in the room immediately. If one of the items on the discussion list is big enough to derail the schedule—or undoes some previously-agreed to decisions—dive right into it. Make sure your client knows the impact this issue has in terms of time and cost

Tell them why you disagree, use the research you did, use data, use relevant writing on the topic. Let them know how their decision might run counter to the goals of the project. And, yes, use aesthetics. That’s one of the reasons they hired you, right? Make the business case, but also make the design case. After all, you can’t always talk someone out of using Copperplate for business reasons

You’ll also learn the fine art of horse trading. I once argued with a client for an hour over an issue I didn’t care about (eventually letting him win!), because I really cared about the next issue coming up. At that point, he was so tired out and savoring his victory that he gave in almost immediately. Arguments are also things to be designed.

There is nothing less helpful than getting feedback in the form of a comp (whether committed in Photoshop, PowerPoint, or Word). Nothing. I mean it. We’ve been in business at Mule for almost ten years now, and this is the only thing we’ve ever fired a client over. (It happened once. The client refused to stop after being told on numerous occasions it was counter-productive, not to mention a contract violation

Remind your client when requesting feedback that if something isn’t working for them to point it out and go into as much detail as possible as to why they feel it’s not working. Ask them to tie it to the goals agreed to earlier in the project. More than anything, their reasoning is critical to solving the problem. Being told to just do something a certain way—or worse, getting a comp of it—only means you have to reverse-engineer the whole thing and find out what you were trying to solve. Lost time, lost budget

It’s worth a sit down. Have them walk through the comp and explain to you why they made the changes they did. This can be used as an exercise on both sides. Either they felt like they couldn’t get their point across verbally, or that you wouldn’t understand it. A walk-through can solve both of those problems

You are now in a position where you’re competing for a job you’ve already earned. That is unacceptable. Do not, under any circumstances, discuss the new comp with your client. Once you do you’ve validated its existence. Pull them aside. If you’re working with a team, this is a job for your team leader to handle; it’s account level. Remind the client that they’ve hired you for this job, and if they feel that you’re no longer capable of fulfilling it, then a larger discussion is needed. See if the client is willing to play by the rules, as they signed up to do; if they are, great. You’ll still need a strategy for dealing with that designer. I’d suggest keeping him close. If you can’t come to an agreement then be ready to walk away. Never, ever, threaten to walk away from a job. You either walk away or you don’t.

Chapter 9: Getting Your Money

“Our seed, first, second, etc., round is about to close,” translates to “We don’t have the money.” As excited as you may be about working with someone, don’t get yourself into a situation where getting paid depends on someone’s funding coming through. That’s not your fight. You already have one business to keep afloat.

There are two budget questions you need to ask during the biz dev process:

“What’s your budget?” “Has it been approved?”

Some clients think that if you “trick” them into telling you their budget you’ll tailor your estimate to it. You know what? They’re right. If you tell me that you have $200K, and I feel it’s appropriate, I’ll show you what a $200K design solution looks like. If you have $40K, I’ll see if I can come up with a $40K solution. But they’ll be different solutions. I’m not going to charge you $200K for a $40K solution just because I know you have it. But the least helpful thing possible is for me to come up with a $200K solution when your budget is $40K. It wastes both our time. So tell me what your budget is and I won’t show you the Audi on the lot when you have Civic money.

The more awkwardly you approach financial conversations with your client, the more awkward inexperienced clients will feel about answering them, and the less inclined more experienced clients will be to trust you.

Negotiate. As always both parties will try to get the best terms for themselves. You propose 15, they counter with 60. So what do you counter with? 30? Who taught you to negotiate? You stick with your 15. Don’t blink first. If you counter with 30 right away you’ll get stuck at 45.

Remember, they’re fighting for an extra 30 days of interest. You’re fighting to stay in business. Which they’ll need you to do to finish the project. It’s in everyone’s best interests to get you paid so you’re focused on the work and not the finances. Never take on terms that put your business at risk

Beware of companies that treat paying you as a favor. You are delivering a valuable service for fair and agreed to compensation. If a potential client starts making cracks about money, get the hell out of there before it goes further. They’re letting you know they don’t value what you do. They will resent making payments.

We are in a special category of industry that gets paid a commencement fee, also called a deposit. It’s an industry standard, and don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Most clients have absolutely no problem with it. Others get a little weirded out. You know what? They’re playing you against your inexperience.

Design is custom manufacturing. Anybody that’s making something specifically for you, and tailored to your needs, is going to charge you a fee up front. What you’re creating is not a commodity that can be turned around and sold to someone else. Your tailor, caterer, architect, the dude making uniforms for your little league team, the dopehead putting together your custom bike: all of these people are making things specifically for you. And if you should disappear on them the pool of people they can turn around and sell those items to is small to nonexistent.

Make sure that your payments are tied to clear milestones. “When they’re happy with the home page” is not a clear milestone. Tie it to an event that can be put on a calendar. Clients can argue whether something is approved or not far longer than they can argue whether a meeting ever happened. So if your milestone is the final design presentation you can invoice right after the meeting. Make sure the milestones are under your control. Unless you’re responsible for a site going live, site launch is a horrible milestone.

And if you remember nothing else, don’t walk away from money that’s owed you. Go get it. You worked for it, you put in honest labor, and it deserves fair compensation. Get over your awkwardness with money. It’s neither charming, nor “authentic.” You’re a professional designer, and professionals get paid.

Chapter 10: Working with Others

Like all animals we crave validation. I didn’t care what my boss thought of those other designers as long as he thought better of me. I was very lucky to meet a designer named Matt early in my career. Matt was brought in to do an annual report that my boss didn’t think I was ready to do. (For what it’s worth I would have nailed it, dick!) From the moment he came in I was irritated. He could sense it; I’m not very good at hiding when I’m irritated. So one day Matt invites me to lunch and we start talking design. He starts asking me about the company. And starts running ideas for the annual report by me. Next thing you know we’re working on it together. He’s giving me tasks. We’re giving each other feedback. He was, for all intents and purposes, my first art director. And he taught me what you could accomplish working toward the same purpose, rather than trying to undermine each other.

So now when I walk into a situation and find another designer in the position that I was in, I reach out to them. Like Matt did.

The goals of the project come first

Whose idea was it? Who cares, if it’s a good idea. If everyone on the team can rally around a common goal the chances of achieving that goal increase exponentially. If we’re spending time debating whether the map transition was Jim’s idea or Betty’s idea, we’re not implementing the map transition. What matters is that we have a good idea to implement.

If a client’s not happy with the firm they hired, let them clean it up. You stay clear of that mess.

The same goes for that horrid practice of posting your version of a redesign that has just gone live. By all means, critique it. Write about what works and doesn’t work, but keep in mind that another designer was working under constraints and internal politics that you may not be aware of. So write up your thoughts as a user, even as a user who’s also a designer. But taking the time to redo their work and posting it publicly is smug and petty.

But until you start treating yourselves with respect, you can’t expect others to do so. Until designers stop treating each other with the catty competitiveness of contestants in a trashy reality TV show, and start supporting each others’ efforts, and figuring out how to complement each others’ skill sets, you cannot expect others to take you seriously.

Working with designers that disagree with you is better than those who agree. They will make you fight over every decision you make! Which means you’ll learn to come up with really tight rationales and really good work. If you can’t get your work past another designer sitting right next to you, someone you trade jokes with every day, you’re not going to get it past a demanding client.

Now mind you, I am not trying to make a connection between art and design. The two couldn’t be more different: one is a corporate business tool for manipulating the poor, and the other is design. But there is a connection to be made between those critiques and peer-to-peer criticism. A few months in and something started to happen in those critiques. First off, people left. Having your work regularly criticized by your peers is hard. But those who stayed watched their work get better. And their critical skills improved as well. By the end of the year, we were not only doing better work, our critical thinking skills were sharp as knives.

I’ll concede the point that going into work every day to be criticized by your peers is not very pleasant. And it’s certainly not going to work out unless you lay some ground rules. It works if everyone involved respects one another. It works when there’s a sense of decorum. You have to talk about the work, not the person doing the work. And you have to recognize that everyone involved in critiquing the work has the best interests of both the project and the designer in mind. (If they don’t, you have a bigger problem

As the person being critiqued, you need to realize that the feedback is not about you, it’s about the work. And you need to be open to good ideas that come from places other than your own head. There’s a balance between defending your work and remaining open to better ideas that takes a long time to develop. It takes confidence, intelligence, and an open mind to allow others to help you make your work better. It takes a thick head not to.

We’re often brought in after a job has been attempted internally. This is a tough situation for everyone. The internal designer might feel threatened that someone else is now in charge of a job they couldn’t do. (More likely they didn’t have the internal support to get it done.) At times the internal designer has lobbied not to have an external team brought in and lost. Also awkward.

If you’re on the services side, make sure to find the client’s internal designers. Their internal knowledge will be a fantastic resource to someone coming in cold. If you’re an internal designer and a design team is brought in, reach out to meet them. Their status as outsiders will make it possible for them to navigate above the company’s internal politics. Swallow your pride. You can both do things the other can’t. Together you’re a stronger team than you are apart.

Act like it’s within your power to improve your relationship with other designers and you usually can.

You can’t work with people you can’t respect. Yet I fear that too often we choose not to respect people simply because their ideas, their viewpoints, and the way they approach a problem is different than ours. And that means we’re cheating ourselves out of a new (or old!) way to solve a problem. There’s always something to be learned from working with another designer, whether they’re a grizzled veteran or a fresh face.

Getting good at doing what you love means having the confidence to recognize what you know, the humility to recognize what you don’t, and the courage to extend our respect to those who make our faults more visible.

Hard is it may be, once you decide another designer owns a particular piece of the problem, you need to trust them with it. Communicate often. Give each other honest feedback. If their work is sucking, let them know, and work out other possible solutions together. But under no means should you “surprise” another designer with your take on something they own. And trust me, as someone who works with other designers, it is so very, very hard to not grab that mouse away sometimes. I’ll know exactly how to fix something, and we’ll be talking it through, and my hand starts slowly working its way to their mouse. That’s a terrible urge though. It’s disrespectful of the other designer. It’s a wasted teachable moment. And above all, it’s a sign you don’t trust your feedback skills as much as your execution skills.

And that is how we work. At the beginning of every project, all the members of the team get together and throw out ideas. There’s a fantastic amount of energy in the room as we simultaneously debate how to organize, design, and build things. As we go, we check on whether someone’s idea might take us over budget, or blow our deadline, while our lead researcher points out that no one wants a website with a fire-breathing fountain.

But I’d caution you to stay away from jobs that take you away from the thing you love to do, which is to design things. Although your definition of “designing things” may change. My friend John Gruber once said that Steve Jobs’ greatest accomplishment wasn’t designing any particular Apple product—it was designing Apple itself. At some point you may get to the point where you’re no longer designing specific products, or specific websites, but instead helping to design the teams that design those things. And eventually designing the companies that those teams design within. But you don’t stop designing.

If you’re at a company where the next step up the ladder means managing people more than managing the quality of the design the company is producing, get the hell out of there. There’s way too much design to be done to be losing good people to idiotic corporate structures that take our best designers out of commission. There are people who love managing people and scheduling their vacations. Leave that to them.

Just as you’re responsible for the quality of a project, your project manager is responsible for getting it done on time. And with the maximum amount of profit. This doesn’t mean you’re not both thinking about those things. It means you each own your part of the project. This often leads to tension, as your ultimate goal is to do good work, and the project manager’s ultimate goal is to do the work on time. And that’s pretty much how it should work. With each party pushing for the piece they own, and playing against each other, you can deliver excellent work on time.

Much as the project manager serves as the voice of the client in the room, the researcher functions as the voice of the user. A good researcher will talk directly to the people the work you’re doing is intended for and find out about their habits and proclivities. Good research is invaluable in knowing whether you’re headed down the right design path.

Research doesn’t tell you how to design, it tells you where to design. And a good researcher isn’t prescriptive, they just gather and analyze the data. It’s your job to figure out what to do with it.

A client should sign off on the underlying structure of the site in a bare-bones wireframe before being shown a presentation layer; that way, we collect agreements at various stages along the way, and things can only unravel as far as the last point of agreement

This doesn’t mean the visual designer is sitting on his hands until the information designer gets that sign-off. Optimally, the two parties work as closely as possible to come up with possibilities and then go off to execute their individual pieces. Solve together, execute apart.

Of all the other people in the office, I work closest with the developers, because until we start making actual code, we’re looking at paintings of websites. We work back and forth at a pretty fast pace, riffing on each others’ work as we go. I don’t hand them things to build, we work on things to build together. The sooner we get into code, the sooner we can start iterating.

For example, we’re loving responsive design, right? And just this week I started mocking up the full-width desktop version of a site, and as soon as we’d agreed on the basic framework, my developer, Jim Ray, took that and started working through the responsive stuff. But every fifteen minutes or so, one of us would have to adjust what we were doing because the other one had either found a problem, or a better way to do something. We were making quicker and better decisions because design and development were informing each other. Had I attempted to mock up all of those responsive states and then hand them to Jim to code, those mistakes would have been baked in, and we would have spent days trying to chase them down. Not to mention that we would have probably asked the client to approve the final design, and it would have been broken.

We often comp just enough to figure out what it is we’re building, which is why we don’t include Photoshop comps with our final deliverables. They’re a mess, and often an unfinished mess which may have little resemblance to what we ended up building. Don’t spend time updating paintings when what the client paid for was a website.

Seasoned engineers tend not to go for trendy ideas, and have a lot of experience making pragmatic decisions. They are very good at what they do, as are you. And you’ll find that if you explain your rationale for your design decisions—as you need to be able to do with anyone you work with—they are an incredible resource. But as long as you’re both on separate sides of the gym thinking each other is weird, no one gets to dance.

I’ve always been one to believe that all design is marketing. A well-designed chair summons your ass to it, a well-designed bike makes even the most honest among us want to steal it, and a well-designed website makes you want to use it. So why does “marketing” leave such a bad taste in designers’ mouths? Well, because most of it is bad.

So as designers I’d like to implore you to do a few things. First off, stop having a knee-jerk response to marketing. Search out the good ones and work with them. Second, accept the fact that you also work in marketing. You are creatures of persuasion by nature. Just persuade people to do better things. Start with yourselves.

Almost no one is coming to the sites you work on because of your excellent design work, and those few that do are there to steal. People show up for the stuff. Design makes the stuff easy to find, and a pleasure to use; but it’s not the stuff. The web is made of content. Design is what holds all that content in place

There are two holy questions of any type of design: who is it for? And what are you putting in it? Content strategists are a godsend in figuring out the latter question

The best way to get more value out of a designer who’s reached a certain level is to have them teach what they know to other designers. (Just make sure you’re in charge of their work quality, not their administrative overhead.)

The first rule of directing others is that you have to let go of that ego. Or at least redirect it. The game is no longer about how well you can design something, it’s about how well you can work with others so that you can design well together. Otherwise you’ll be stuck in a situation where your capacity is limited to what you yourself can produce.

Give your people enough leeway to fail. And not so you can swoop in and save them, but specifically so they can trust that you won’t. They need to learn to fall before they learn how to recover.

Think of it this way, though: there are going to be people smarter than you out there. Where do you want them? Working for you, or for someone else? And surrounding yourself with smart, talented people is only going to make you better. It’s certainly the right call for the sake of the team.

I pick up the phone. He’s mad. He explains the problem. And I reply: “This is my responsibility. I apologize. It won’t happen again. Now what can we do to fix it?”

Did we actually screw up? Who knows. But I realized that the only way we could get past his anger was to apologize. And that’s not something I could ask someone else to do, nor would he have accepted it from someone else

Let’s be honest. It’s a pain in the ass to get up every morning and design stuff for people. Most of the time you’re hitting your head against the wall, or going down the wrong path. Most of the work we do gets thrown out. Even the best of us have worse batting averages than ball players.

But those times when you get stuff right? Oh man, those are good times.

So I wrote this book to remind myself of those good times. To remind myself that the time I’ve spent beating my head against the wall, filling up a digital trash can with metaphorical crumpled up work, and being asked to make logos bigger, buttons brighter, and “jazzing things up” actually amounted to something