Are Clients the Devils, Buddies, UnSpeakables or Angels?
April 19th, 2008
It’s with great pleasure that I introduce this month’s guest writer, Jef Tan.
Jef is a dear friend of mine. Not only that, he was my colleague when we worked in Pounds and Jordan. On top of that, he has been my boss. After he left P&J to start his own agency, he invited me to head his account servicing department. Those were exciting days where adredalin was perpetually high as we kept clinching coveted accounts over the big boys. It was with regrets that I left his agency to join the client side. Jef went on to make it big in the creative scene and won 3 awards from Creative Circles. However, it will be a big mistake to see Jef simply as an outstanding designer. To me, Jef is no ordinary designer. He can write excellent ad copy effortlessly to match his creative idea. He will unreservedly contribute his opinion on marketing strategies and tactics during brainstorming sessions. He is an asset in any team.
I enjoy working with Jef. When I started Versa Creations a few years, he was the only one I could entrust with the design of my corporate logo. I had expected nothing short of good work, still, he surprised me with the originality of his idea. Until now, my ambigram logo remains one of the most talk about features on my business card. Recently, David Airey - the popular designer-blogger - short-listed Versa Creations’ logo in his Logo Design Love Award.
Jef Tan is currently freelancing as an art director in Melbourne and is working on his first book. In his own words, “thankfully not about the creative industry”.
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Clients are a funny lot of people aren’t they? They are the reason why businesses like ours exist. But for most of us with the odious task of coming up with design solutions or any kind of creative work (and by that I mean, a unique genre of service where human emotion is a deciding raw ingredient), clients can sometimes force us to evaluate why we were ever in the creative business in the first place. After having spent a decade and a half in this trade, I should like to say that I’ve seen them all: clients who can bring us to the moon and back and of course, the ones that send us to the psychiatrist’s chair.
I’d like to offer a quick categorisation of the various kinds of clients that creative folks have encountered at some point of their professional lives. These are all pigeon-hole categories of course, common sense could never draw distinct lines between them all. I do this in the hope that for the younger lot of us, it might serve as some sort of an umbrella, you know, for when shit hits the fan.
The Devil
Let’s start with the worst type of all and why not? The Devil is the type of client whom you’ve come to depend on for the most part of your balance sheet. The kind that might even possibly pay well and provides enough work to keep your younger colleagues away from Facebook. This client will most likely be the one whom you’d reschedule appointments at the drop of the hat. And get this: the Devil knows all this and the evil thing is the Devil will use it to his or her advantage each and every time. Sounds familiar? You know it’s the Devil when Read the rest of this entry »
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