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In this post I’ll outline my policy and also some ways I avoid the problem altogether.

A Necessary Evil

Like the saying goes, you need to plan for every eventuality at the beginning of a new project so your client knows what happens should the worst happen and they not be satisfied with the design work you produce.

Its so important to do this as a designer because even if you’ve never had this situation arise (thankfully I’m yet to experience it!) you need to have a clear policy for handling it outlined in your contact should it happen to you.

Put your feet in the shoes of a client who is parting with their cash – they’ll want to know what happens should the designs you produce not be immediately to their liking, e.g. how many hours of revisions do you allow for per design concept.

Sometimes as a designer you can produce something that you think looks great but it doesn’t quite tick all the boxes for your client – after all design is so subjective. The planning process helps eliminate this, but more on that later. I’d even go as far to say that making amendments to a design doesn’t mean its a bad design in the first place.

Quite often its very valuable to work with the client to refine and improve on the initial design concept you produced to find the best possible solution. As long as both parties are clear on how this works in the very beginning and the client is happy to pay for refinement time above and beyond the designers usual policy then this is fine.

In my design contract I typically include the following;

6. Client Amends
Designer prides itself in providing excellent customer service. That is the spirit of our agreement and the spirit of the Designer’s business. To that end, we encourage input from the Client during the design process. However, amends totaling more than 2 hours of time per design concept will be added to the total invoice. Amendments made to the design once it has been ‘signed off’ will be billed at the normal agreed hourly rate.

This clause is in my contract just to make sure both myself and my client know that we have to ‘sign-off’ on the design at some point. Its not profitable for either parties to be making iterations and amendments to a design for weeks after the first version has been produced.

Combining this kind of statement in a design contract along with clearly defined milestones for each stage of the project makes sure that my client knows exactly what to expect.

Avoiding the situation altogether

Ask questions and plan – simple!

If you ask the right questions at the beginning of a project and make sure you plan (as I’ve mentioned before, wireframing is my preferred method) then you’ll very rarely have a situation arise where the client doesn’t like the any aspects of the design you’ve created.

Creating a wireframe before you start a design allows the client to see what direction you’re planning on going in terms of layout. Its much easier to make changes at this stage than once you’ve spent time creating the design in Photoshop.

Collecting examples of websites that your client likes is also a really helpful exercise. A few times I’ve been going through a completed design questionnaire I send out to new clients and when I open up the example sites they’ve provided links to, I get a slight surprise. I always think it’s better to get that suprise at the planning stage rather than in an email from the client when they’re reviewing the homepage design you’ve just spent a day working on.

Your Experiences?

I hope that as a fellow designer you found this article useful and even as a potential client reading through my blog, I hope this helped inform you about how I handle design amendments.

I’d be really interested to hear from other designers about how they handle amendments with their clients. I’d also be interested in hearing from anyone who reads this blog who isn’t a web designer. What questions would you have about working with a freelance web designer? I’ll be looking to write more of these kind of posts in the future.

Renault Sport iPhone Application

Although between us we have many decades experience in magazine publishing, we have a lack of knowledge of the design of iPhone apps. It was essential to find a young designer who is fully on the pace and willing and able to hold our hands. Will is a grafter, does stuff to deadlines, is reasonable with his charges and is a nice bloke to do businesss with.
- Colin Goodwin, Project Lead

Although this project has been put on the back burner right now, this was a fantastic iPhone design project to work on and enabled me to produce some really nice concepts. I particularly enjoy iPhone UI design as it makes a nice change from designing websites and provides a different kind of challenge.

The goal with the design of this app was to stay true to Renault’s branding and create something that was visually engaging and extremely easy to use.

Carbon Counter

Currently in development, this project required me to produce homepage and internal page designs, as well as XHTML & CSS templates. This was a fun project to produce designs for as its purpose is to sell a web application. It was important to divide the page up into clear sections and also have some prominent call to actions to accompany the video in the header.

The template development was also a chance to use some subtle CSS3 techniques to progressively enhance the look and feel of the site.

Southsea Skatepark

I think you’ve hit the nail right on the head again with this one. Very impressive.
- Andrew, Director

A design agency in Portsmouth contacted me to produce a design for a project they wanted to spruce up. Their client wanted something bright, vibrant and that immediately gave that ‘skate’ feel as soon as you landed on the page.

I felt this was the perfect opportunity to create a predominantly dark design that uses a bright highlight colour to pick out calls to action and important parts of the page. I also made use of some grunge style textures in the header and background of the page to give some subtle depth to the design.

SavvyAgent

We were really pleased with the work. Will was efficient and delivered the project on time. He was a delight to work with, professional and a very talented graphic designer.
- Catherine Lamond, Savvy Agent Project Coordinator

SavvyAgent contacted me to produce the look and feel for their new web application. The screenshot above shows the homepage I came up with to sell the application to potential clients. I was responsible for the company branding, information architecture, website design and application design.

I think this project calls for a blog post of its own one day!

Richmond Soul

I always look forward to the time that Will sends the first view of the new design. He never fails to capture my exact thoughts, and add more than I had originally considered. Will is an incredible designer, who is happy to talk and add to designs in order to achieve a perfect result. Wouldn’t use anyone else!
- Steve Giles, One Half of Richmond Soul

Steve Giles contacted me again to create the website for his motown, funk, soul vocal act Richmond Soul. Steve was able to provide me with some great photographs to include in this design which was a real bonus. The website gives the band a much more professional feel and will hopefully enable them to build on their success. It also gives them a place to publish their audio and video content to their growing fan base and potential new clients.

Thanks and Merry Christmas!

All in all 2010 has been another great year and I’ve had the pleasure of working with some great clients. Thanks to everyone I’ve worked with for getting in touch with me and letting me loose on your projects. Its been a blast!

In case I don’t get the chance to post here again before Christmas, Merry Christmas to you all and I hope you have a great holiday season…

Oh by the way, if you’d like to work with me in 2011, feel free to get in touch.

Thanks MacUser Mag!

I have to say that I did re-read the email a couple of times just to make certain what I’d read was correct. Thankfully Nigel Tipping was kind enough to send me a copy so I could get my hands on the real thing.

I just want to say thanks to MacUser Magazine for featuring me, and especially thank Nigel for being kind enough to send me a copy of the mag.  I had absolutely no idea of the feature so it was a real shock! It was great to be included alongside some other excellent portfolios as well, like Digital Mash, Jose Ortiz (recently redesigned), Will Pearson, and Robbie Manson to name but a few. If you’d like to see what they said about Authentic Style, here is the excerpt;

Web designer William Smith has one of the better single-page sites we’ve seen, because it has surprisingly thoughtful navigation. Some single-page sites provide links between sections that jump to the top of the page, but here you’ll find the full navigation bar. It’s a much better option, since you can seamlessly flow through the site in whatever order you prefer. Occasionally portfolios include a thumbnail and a link to the client’s site, which can be a frustrating situation if a site has subsequently been redesigned. Smith avoids this with Web 2.0 image previews of complete website designs and a link so you can sample the site’s interaction.

I’ll leave you with some more images of the magazine…