Showing your progress

For the first eight years running my agency, the same thing kept happening: I’d hand over a design I was proud of, and the client would take a red pen to it.

Not just “make the logo bigger”, but make the colors worse, the fonts awful, the layout trash, and the copy unreadable.

More times than I’d like to admit, my excitement for a project crashed before a single line of code is written. I’d go from trying to do my best work, to just trying to get a project out the door.

No one wins in this scenario, so I started paying attention to what was actually going wrong.

It’s easy to blame it on clients being clients… But it’s silly to sit back and blame someone who simply doesn’t know any better.

We know colors have harmony, that fonts carry feeling, that layouts guide the eye, and that a well-placed CTA is what turns a visitor into a lead. We make twenty bad versions to find the one that works.

But the client doesn’t see any of that. They only see the final proof. And without the thinking behind it, everything looks like preference instead of intention.

So, over my past few projects I’ve changed the way I present designs.

Instead of dumping my finished proofs on the client and saying “Hey, what do you think?”, I’ve started taking them behind the scenes on my design process. Telling them the story of how I’ve taken what I’ve learned about their business, their brand, their message, and their audience, and tied that into design decisions on their site.

I walk them through how the color palette was chosen for warmth and trust, how the fonts were paired to balance approachability and expertise, how each section moves their customer toward a specific next step.

I compare these things to the way big brands do it, how it connects back to what we learned in discovery, and how it’s been specifically designed with their ideal customer in mind.

And I’ll be damned if it hasn’t worked.

Not only have proofs been getting approved with no (or very few) changes, clients aren’t just signing off, they’re completely bought in.

I’ll admit, I was worried it sounded a little “woo-woo”. But it’s just communicating all the things we do instinctively as designers and letting the client be part the process in seeing how we go from A to Z.

What I’m learning is that what looks like bad client feedback is often just missing context, and the revisions are clients filling in the blanks I was leaving empty.