Erika Hall:

Bottom line, get all your hopes, expectations, and assumptions sorted internally before approaching a designer, and then be prepared to have a straightforward conversation once you do.

It’s all common sense, yet pretty uncommon to actually have a client got it all sorted-out before started a project, of course this in the scope of my experience so far dealing with clients, which is only 4–5 years. There’s nothing like the perfect client but it’s part of our job as a designers to work together and solve their problems with smart – sometimes also stupid – solutions, in this business of client service.

Talking about clients make me remember this great quote from Mad Men, which by the way fast become my second “sum of all wisdom” type of thing, after The Godfather trilogy.

You know what my father used to say? “Being with a client is like being in a marriage. Sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons, and eventually they hit you in the face.”

– Roger Sterling

A collection of thoughts from many great designer on the designer–client relationship. I like this one by Quentin Newark:

“If I go to see the doctor, I accept that the doctor has trained, has skill, has experience, is concentrating on one aspect of me. I’ve asked them to do that. What I don’t do is what bad graphic design clients do. I don’t lean over the doctor’s shoulder and say, ‘Could we make that pill a bit larger?”

Snarky but true.