You Have to Have That Fight

Thursday night at AIGA Chattanooga’s InForm panel discussion, Coptix designer Chris Johnston said something that really stuck. Asked about how to handle a situation where a client, or a boss, hated a particular design, he said “sometimes you have to have that fight.” He clarified that it shouldn’t be about your personal attachment to the project or how cool you might think it is, but rather about why that design solution is the right move for the business. In those cases, he said, you have to have that fight.

It’s easier said than done, but I can say from experience that the opportunity to defend your design work can be very rewarding. One of my favorite design projects at Clarity was developing the packaging for a new line of cordless amplified phones. It was such a departure from our established look and so unexpected (I’d taken it upon myself to try something new) that my boss asked me, along with the product manager (my partner in crime), to write up a defense of the work. He didn’t even say whether he liked the design or not, he just asked us to explain why we thought it was the right thing to do.

I knew in my gut that the shift from our existing sytle was appropriate for these new products, but the exercise of putting it on paper went a long way in getting everyone on board. The product manager and I explained how the new visual strategy was, at heart, a natural evolution of the brand and an extension of the new technology and industrial design present in the phones themselves. Our design brief was tightly integrated with what we knew to be the values of our brand, our target market and our aspirations as a company. In the end, the new visual design scheme was adopted for the product line — not just for the packaging, but in collateral materials, print ads and a flash piece for our website.

The day the first packaging sample arrived from the factory was one of my proudest days there, and it probably wouldn’t have been quite as sweet without having gone that extra mile to justify the design.