The art of selling creative
Published by Nick Hall on 12 October 2009.No doubt the thought of having the words creative and selling in the same sentence makes some of you cringe, but the fact remains that if you are going to be successful in this business it is imperative that you learn how to talk about what it is you do.
Our task as creative communicators is to produce things that convey a specific message or impression to a specific group of people on behalf of someone else. At our disposal we have twenty-six letters, thousands of font choices, millions of colours, countless sources of available imagery and an infinite combination of all these at our disposal.
As designers, part of our task then is to filter the useful from the useless, and that requires decisions. The more experienced one is, the better (or at least quicker) these decisions are made.
Remember, clients now have the same hard resources available, even if they are the slightly retarded versions found on a pc. What they lack, however, is the ability or expertise to make quick, informed decisions as to what to filter out. The resulting visual orgy can be found in many corporate in-house newsletters, which are often quickly relegated to the recycling bin without much thought or concern.
When discussing creative with a client, I make it a point to inform them as to the decisions we made during the creation, and also why those decisions were made. This adds value (providing you're not obviously full of shit) and lets the client know that there is indeed a difference between you - a design professional - doing something versus their 12 year old cracking off the annual report in Mario Paint. It also never fails to get me excited about the work all over again, and if I'm excited they usually get excited too.
I'm reminded of a lesson I learned the hard way. I was a junior at the time, and was asked by an Account Executive to sit in on a meeting where he was presenting my designs to a client. A calendar, featuring kids art as the focal point for each month. As a complementary colour I went with a dark chocolate brown, which worked with the primary colours in the pictures without making them look cheap. I knew why I made this decision when I was designing it, but when asked by the client I failed to recount the basis for my decision. The resulting effect was that my decision appeared flippant and I became an unnecessary embellishment to the entire process.
Never again.