7 Common Design Mistakes That Clients Love (and how to fight back)

Posted Thursday, 30 July 2009 by Peter Alexander in Design, Entertainment, Inspiration

From flash intros, to logo theft, to information overload, clients often ask a design team to do a lot of stuff that’s just plain wrong. Here are 7 of the most common mistakes clients might ask you to make -- and how to talk some sense into them.

1. Scrimping on photography

The problem: For some reason, lots of clients will happily pay for hours and hours of a designer's time, printing costs, etc., etc., but they'll freak out when it comes time to pay for photography. Either they'll want to avoid using it altogether, or they'll send you a bunch of lame images from their marketing department. Of course, not every project needs photos. But when you know they would make a big difference to the quality and effectiveness of the design, it's frustrating to be told no.

(Image courtesy of Crestock's Daily Worst submitted images)

How to fight back: Tug at their heartstrings so they'll open the purse strings.
Good photography has the ability to provoke an emotional reaction. Use that to your advantage. Whenever possible, avoid using weak place-holder images in your mock-ups. Before you present any mock, even an early iteration, take some time to find great imagery that helps communicate their brand and your design. And don't be afraid to draw on some expert advice on the subject. When David Ogilvy wrote his classic book Ogilvy On Advertising, one of the key lessons was the importance of a good image for memorable design. And, as the good folks over at FutureNow write, "Tests Indicate Ogilvy's Old-School Layout Still a Winner".

2. Wanting a Flash intro, despite it being 2009

The problem: Seriously people, do we really still have to talk about these? They're just a bad idea. People are impatient, and if they're coming to your client's website, it's because they want something. What they don't want is to see a bunch of vector graphics swooshing around pointlessly.

How to fight back: Drop some stats on them.
The killer number? Fully 25% of site visitors will immediately leave when they see a Flash intro. And that's even if there's a "skip intro" button. If losing a quarter of their potential traffic isn't enough to convince a client to ditch it, then you can pick up some more ammunition from "How to Convince a Client They Don't Need a Splash Page", at the great SEO blog SEOmoz.

3. Too much information

The problem: The average client seems to have never heard the old adage: less is more. No matter what you're designing, they'll want to add more copy, links, calls-to-action, logos, headers, footers, global nav elements and 1-800 numbers. Part of the problem is that they think that if it's there, their customers will read it. And sometimes part of the problem is that they're balancing the needs of fifteen different divisions within their company, who all want some of that prime screen real-estate on whatever you're designing.

How to fight back: Ask them what they want the design to accomplish, not what it should contain. No matter what you're designing, it should have a purpose. Whether it's a poster, product packaging or a corporate homepage, the design should serve to accomplish something for the person who will ultimately be viewing it. Once you're discussing what a viewer needs from the design (rather than what the company wants it to contain) you're on the right track to reducing the amount of information to only that which is necessary.

The "Long Neck Theory" by Gerry McGovern states that every website has a very short list of "killer tasks" that visitors to the site want to accomplish. His testing indicates that just 5% of content, which serve those killer tasks, is used by at least 25% of visitors to a site. And past that key 5%, the vast majority of the rest of the content is only useful to a tiny percentage of people. Which means that not every little bit of content on a site needs prominent placement.

If you're designing for the web, hopefully you'll have an interaction/information architect on your team to help fight this battle. But if not, a little knowledge of some basic usability guidelines can go a long way. If you want to read a very smart and easy to read introduction to the subject, check out the book "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.

4. Using white text on a black background (for the web)

The problem: Okay, admittedly this is a controversial one. There are many designers who love this aesthetically, and feel that it provides the right amount of contrast to make it very readable. And if you're designing for print, it can be effective, especially if it's used sparingly. However, if you're designing for the web, and a client asks you to do it, just say no. And the reason has nothing to do with the way it looks. There's a significant percentage of people who find it very uncomfortable viewing a page with that color scheme. And they will leave the page, never to return. There isn't much agreement on how high that percentage is...but if you're losing any traffic just because of the way text displays, that's a problem.

How to fight back: Bust out the usability hammer.
Yes, many designers feel that sticking too close to usability guidelines can lead to stale, predictable design. But those same guidelines can be a good weapon when you want to talk a client out of something. Generally, usability guidelines indicate that to get the most readable level of contrast, you're best off going with #333333 or #444444 on a white background, as design researcher Todd Warfel explains in his post "Color Theory in the Digital World".

You may not necessarily agree with that idea (and you can judge by yourself, cause what you're reading right now is #333333 on white), but you can still use it to help convince a client to ditch the white on black.

5. Wanting the logo bigger

The problem: Okay, this is a bit of a cliché joke among designers, but it's cliché for a reason. Almost anyone working directly with clients has had to deal with this design mistake at some point in their career. A big part of the problem? When they look at a design mock-up, many clients have trouble imagining themselves as a customer. They focus on what's important to them – the logo and other branding elements. And so it's only natural they want them to be receive more emphasis, at the expense of all the other really important stuff their customers want, and that you've spent hours and hours putting together in an elegant and effective design.

How to fight back: Nike to the rescue.
There are lots of arguments you can make about why the different elements of your design are the size they are, and are placed where they are. And hopefully you'll be able to speak to your design in a way that's so convincing, the client immediately agrees that their idea to make the logo bigger isn't a great one. You could even mention usability guru Jakob Nielsen's assertion that: "The most critical page elements should be visible above the fold" (Guideline #66 on his list of "113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability") and therefore an excessively large logo is taking very valuable real estate away from things that site visitors are actually looking for.

But, if all that doesn't work, then talk to your client about the Nike swoosh. Specifically, how it's one of the best, most recognizable, most remembered logos in history. Then show that client any Nike ad, or bring up Nike.com. And make a show of pointing out that little, tiny, logo waaaay off in the corner of the page. It's not scientific, but it is a good anecdotal case study that might help convince them that you're not crazy for keeping their logo nice and tidy and small medium-sized.

6. Ripping off someone else's logo

The problem: You've been asked to design a logo. Great, you get to test your creativity as you struggle to come up with something cool within the extreme restraints of logo design. But there's one catch – the client shows you another logo (maybe it's for a competitor, maybe it's just for their favorite brand of baby food) and says "make it look kinda like this."

How to fight back: Play to their ego
On a purely ethical level, ripping off a logo is not cool. But good luck having a civil conversation with a client, where you convince him or her to re-assess their ethical code. So the best way to fight back here is to convince them that their brand's identity needs to be unique because, after all, their company is better than the competition, or at least should aim to be.

If they skew their own logo and branding too close to that of another company, they risk consumer confusion. And while a bit of consumer confusion may actually be appealing to a client who's own company is the new kid on the block, if they ever hope to be top dog, they'll benefit greatly from their own strong brand identity. And that all starts with a unique logo.

More logo-ripping at FloatingBanana and information on How NOT to Design a Logo over at Webdesign Depot ;-)

7. Wanting a terrible font

The problem: Fonts matter. As a designer, you know that better than anyone. But for people who don't really spend much time thinking about them, fonts can be mysterious and confusing. And that can lead to truly terrible design direction from clients who know just enough about fonts to care which one you choose, but not enough to actually know what works.

How to fight back: Tap into the research
Because typography's been around for so damn long, a LOT of research has gone into the use and efficacy of fonts. Of course, in the age of digital, some of that work is obsolete. But font usage continues to inspire massive amounts of studies and research. So much that you can look online and quickly find a half dozen references to why exactly it's a terrible idea to use, say, Comic Sans.

A good starting point to find some of these online resources is the "Fonts & Typography resource page" here on the Crestock blog, or get your own "Love to Hate Comic Sans" merchs here.

Ever wiggled your way out of a bad client request? Share the secret of how you did it!

Useful post for anyone who struggles with Clients and their web designs!!!

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People are always looking for new ways to upload, organize, and share their photos online. With the popularity of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, people want to be able to manage their photos in one centralized location, while being able to update family and friends who use these social networks on their latest photos.

You will find a great list of photo sharing sites all with similar features, however each are unique in their own way. Explore the different options to see what fits your photo sharing needs.

1. 23 Photo Sharing

With 23, you can keep all of your photos in one central place. Organize, share and even order real prints from your account. With great features like bulk uploading, email photos in batch, and customized album colors, allows you to manage your photo collection. Browse the community albums to see what people have recently uploaded, make a comment on photos you like, and even post photos to your Facebook account.

23 will allow you to upload up to 25 photos a month for free. For $25/month you can upload unlimited photos to your account. Sign up for a free account.

2. Flickr

One of the most popular photo sharing sites, Flickr, allows you to upload, edit, organize, and share your photos. Organizing your photos has never been easier with the “collections”, “sets”, and “tags” features. If you want to only share photos with certain people, Flickr has privacy features that allow you to pick who can see which photos, along with a usage license for copyright protection.

Make uploading photos easier with the Flickr desktop application. This app is a stand alone desktop tool that lets you connect to your Flickr account and easily upload photos directly from your desktop.

3. Photobucket

Photobucket will allow you to upload all of your photos and videos to your account to share with everyone. Family and friends can view your photos without having to sign up for an account. You can share photos by email, IM and mobile links. It also comes with a built in organizer, editor, and searching tool to help you find your photos quickly.

With the scrapbook builder, you can build online and printed scrapbooks by a simple drag and drop feature. You can also create slideshows with their slideshow builder, and post it on your website, blog or profile.

4. Webshots

Along with being able to upload, organize and share your photo collection, you can buy professional prints, screensavers, and wallpapers. They also have a full ecommerce site that lets you buy calendars, cards, mugs, office gifts…all customized using your photos.

If you are looking to do more than just have a place to upload your photos, this is a great option. With the e-store and the ability to order prints you can do a lot more with your pictures than most other photo sharing sites. There are two different accounts, free and premium. See an account comparison to see which account type is right for you.

5. Picasa

Google acquired the photo sharing site, Picasa in 2004. Since then, Google has improved the service by offering excellent usability, updated uploading, sharing, and editing features to touch up your photos.

Similar to Flickr, Picasa also has a desktop feature that will allow you to connect to your account and organize your photos on your hard drive. You can easily pick which photos on your computer that you would like to add to your web-based account.

6. SmugMug

Upload unlimited photos without the worries of spam or advertisements within your account. Customize your account by changing the colors, layout, fonts and graphics. Purchase professional prints and gifts like photo books, posters, framed prints, and holiday cards…all at great prices. If you are worried about your photos getting deleted, SmugMug has that solved. SmugMug uses Amazon.com to safely backup your photos with their network of datacenters. If you would like to retrieve your photos you can do so by downloading them or put them on a DVD.

You can try SmugMug for free, however their are 3 different price points for premium accounts. Premium accounts start from $39.95.

7. Zoom

Create a free account and have no limits on uploading, storing and archiving photos. The free account does however come with advertisements, but can be removed by purchasing a premium account. There is a social community aspect that allows you to see who “Faved” and commented on your photos with a featured called “Social Stream”.

8. eSnips

Get up to 5GB of free space on eSnips so you can upload and share not only photos, but files, videos and music. If you like to share things other than just photos, this is probably a site you should sign-up for. eSnips can act like a mobile hard drive that can be accessed from any computer. You can also connect with the community and people who share similar interests as you. There is now a new feature that will allow you to upload and publish your photos to eSnips via Twitter.

Sign-up for an eSnips account

9. Photie

Photie is a free photo sharing site that allows you to upload photos with no file size restrictions and unlimited storage. Easily post your photos to your own website, social network profile, and photie community. You can also keep track of where people are looking at your photos across the web. Access your photos from anywhere, share your photos publicly with your family and friends, and back up your photos by gaining unlimited storage space.

10. Shutterfly

Upload and share your photos with your friends right from your email. Members of Shutterfly will be able to get printed photos delivered directly to your home. Shutterfly comes with uploading options for PC, Mac, and Mobile users. You can also mail in a CD of photos, use software like Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 or Picasa desktop software to send directly to your Shutterfly account.

Shutterfly also comes with a photo store that allows you to turn your pictures into a wonderful product. Create customized photo books, cards, stationery, calendars, and gifts.

11. Fotki

Fotki is known as a photo sharing, photo printing, photo selling and blogging site. What makes Fotki unique is the social community aspect. Interact with other Fotki users to comment, share and make friends in a fun community environment. Fotki also holds weekly contests where you can showcase your latest photos and gain recognition within the community.

12. PBase

A great place to host and share photos with your friends and family. Pbase allows you to create a profile, upload your photos and share with other base members.

You can get a yearly membership for only $23, which includes 500 MB of photo storage or for $60 you can get 1500 MB of storage. If you want to try before you by, they offer a free account that allows you to see the features before you commit to a premium membership.

13. Blue Melon

Get up to 1GB of free photo storage with a Blue Melon account. Install their desktop application and upload existing photos from Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug or Facebook. With an easy drag and drop system you can move photos into albums, then organize each album into categories. You can personalize your albums with customized themes and layouts, as well as create slideshows and embed your slideshow into your website or blog. Once your photos are uploaded, feel free to print them using various sizes and layouts.

14. Shozam

Shozam allows you to create a website for your photos, making it easy for users to navigate your photo album. Packages start at $24.95, which include creating a website in just minutes, upload your photos to any website, and the ability to make money from your photo galleries.

15. Pikeo

Store, organize, and share 1GB of free photos with your friends and family. Pikeo has built a community around people who love to travel and take pictures from around the world. You can create your own group and publish photos, allowing other fans to comment and connect with you. Invite friends to your group to join in the fun!

16. LifeSnapz

Have you ever wanted an easy way to keep in touch with family and friends? Well now you can with LifeSnapz. Capture life events with photo sharing, videos, timelines, and maps and share them with your family. Create a digital scrapbook or diary with your family of memorable events that happen. Keep your photos and videos private by only sharing your content with people you know.

17. ComBoost

Share your photos, visit photo albums, and create slideshows for your blog or website. ComBoost comes with neat features like full screen slideshows, PDF printing and the ability to download photos in 5 different formats. If you are looking to create a slideshow of your photos, you can customize it with colors, titles, and comments. Visit a public gallery to see other peoples photos, or receive an invitation from one of your friends.

18. Jalbum

Jalbum has published over 28 million photos and over 5.5 million app downloads. In order to create an account you must create your own personal url on the jalbum.net website…and best of all, it’s free. Once you have uploaded your photos you can customized the look of your albums with skins and themes. There have social widgets you can use to paste into your blog or website.

19. Ipernity

Feel free to publish your photos, video, and audio to anything like your blog or website. There is also a powerful feature that can let you search through all of your content to find what you are looking for.

Search through the different groups to find photographs that interest you. Join groups, leave comments, view other photos by the group owner and download photos you like.

20. Kodak Gallery

The Kodak Gallery allows you to do much more than just upload your favorite photos. Have the ability to create photo products like calendars, prints, frames, cards, photo books and more. Unlike many of the photo sharing sites, this is probably the most flexible site in terms of creating unique products that incorporate your photos. To make things easier, you can use the Kodak editing software that will make it easier for you to upload, organize and share your photos.

21. iPhoto

The iPhoto software will do wonders for editing your photos. Crop, retouch, remove red-eye, then share on the web with places like Facebook, mobile me, and Flickr. Design custom photos, books, cards, and calendars. Apple also leverages the latest face recognition technology that will be able to recognize peoples faces and tag them properly.

You can also purchase iLife, which lets you get the most out of your photos, movies and music. Organize photos, makes a movie, and publish photos on a website.

22. Panoramio

Are you an avid traveler? Panoramio allows you to upload your photos and tag them with places you have been from around the world. Panoramio uses the Google Maps API to give users the ability to browse photos with the ease of clicking on a spot on the world map. This is a great resource or anyone looking to travel to different parts of the world, and want to see what pictures others have already taken.

23. Phanfare

Phanfare comes with unlimited storage for all of your photos and HD videos, create your own photo website, a customized url, high quality 720p HD video, slideshow creation, and safeguard disaster to backup all of your digital photos and videos.

Phanfare comes with a 14 day free trial, to let you enjoy the unlimited storage, beautiful web albums, and other great features, before you purchase a subscription. If you are looking for a package to purchase, you can buy a premium or pro package that give you different options and the flexiblity based on your needs.

24. Snapfish

Snapfish by HP has over 70 million members in over 20 countries and over 2 billion photos stored online! There are over 100 customizable photo gifts, free photo editing tools, mobile uploading, subscription video uploading, and the ability to share with only family and friends.

Receive a free account with online digital photo printing, free online photo albums, digital photo sharing services and fun photo gifts. Sign up now and get unlimited storage and 50 free 4×6 prints with your first upload. Get great discounts on printing your photos, with 35% off all calendars and 9 cents for 4×6 photos.

25. Woophy

Woophy is looking for the help of amateur photographers to upload their photos and cover ever inch of the world with images that represent the world’s beauty. Users can upload their photos and browse the community photos to see recent and top rated photos of the day.

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Great list of photo sharing sites.

As Twitter has rapidly risen to dominate the real-time web, related applications and services have also come to prominence; many in the field of URL shortening. Foremost amongst these is bit.ly, which today released a Pro edition of the service.

bitly.Pro is, in essence, a “white-label” edition of the public service, where a short URL such as http://bit.ly/bHRDfP can now be replaced by one with a custom domain, such as http://imrn.me/bHRDfP.

As well as the ability to utilise a custom domain, bitly.Pro also provides a dashboard view, enabling users to view analytics on all the links shared from your custom domain. I put bitly.Pro through its paces today by registering my new domain — imrn.me. Setting up the service is surprisingly easy; here’s how I did it:

1. I registered imrn.me with GoDaddy.
2. I changed the domain’s nameserver settings to point at my own MediaTemple-hosted server.
3. I altered the DNS records (A and CNAME) for the new domain to verify and redirect to bit.ly.pro.
4. I logged into bitly.Pro with my standard bit.ly account details to link both account histories.
5. Used the standard bit.ly bookmarklet to generate my first custom shortened URL: http://imrn.me/90mM9Q

All in all, the entire setup process took me around 10-15 minutes and the new real-time analytics dashboard will prove useful in tracking the “virality” of my shared links. Sadly, your shortened URLs still share their namespace with other bit.ly users, so your domain will still be suffixed by a five-character reference.

However, other than vanity and analytics, there are good reasons for employing a custom domain for your shortening your URLs.

Why use a custom domain?

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In recent months, there’s been much discussion on the impact short URLs are having on the long-term stability of the web; notably by weakening the web with centralised hyperlinks, reducing transparency, introducing unwelcome interstitials and providing opportunities for phishing attacks.

Delicious creator Joshua Schacter suggests some publishers should offer their own shortening services to mitigate some of the negative circumstances of shortening.

Indeed, we’ve recently seen brands such as Flickr, TechCrunch, WordPress and Google offer short URLs such as flic.kr, tcrn.ch, wp.me & goo.gl.

For such prominent brands, content publishers and even prolific Twitter users, bitly.Pro offers a useful form of transparency and trust to users clicking on shortened links.

Though the service doesn’t address the problem of centralization of links, it’s a step in the right direction. For those who demand more control, installing a hosted URL shortening app may be more appropriate.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

It can be hard to remember to routinely clean out your computer — whether that means running virus scans or organizing your files. That’s why having a day devoted to making sure that your computer is working well and that you can find anything you need on it is a good idea. The Institute for Business Technology originally sponsored a National Clean Out Your Computer Day several years ago, assigning it to the second Monday in February. It’s a holiday well worth adding to your calendar.

Clean Up Your Operating System

It seems to be a fact of life that the longer your operating system has been installed on your computer, the slower it gets. I recently had to back up all my data and reinstall my operating system, and the difference it made is incredible. Even if you aren’t prepared to completely wipe your system, there are some things you can do to speed things up.

Microsoft recommends running built-in utilities, like Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter, on a regular basis. There are comparable utilities in every operating system. You can also use an external tool, like Iolo Technologies’ System Mechanic, which can fix common problems and reduce demands on your system, like unused background programs.

Clean Out Files

Even as hard drives keep getting bigger, we keep coming up with files to fill them up. While sorting through all your files may not be necessary, doing a little spring cleaning can make them easier to manage. Personally, I try to get the files I don’t think I’m going to need again off my main computer and on to a separate hard drive every so often, if only to make sure that I have space for more.

It may not be a bad idea to go through what you have on other storage media. I recently ran across a stack of floppy disks, only to realize that I didn’t have access to anything that could actually read them at this point. There are a few files there that I’d like to have, but otherwise, there’s no reason to cart around old floppy disks.

Don’t Forget the Hardware

Even if the only part of your computer that you can actually see is the monitor, it’s worthwhile to occasionally knock the dust off. We’ve discussed cleaning laptops before, and cleaning desktops isn’t too different. Wipe down those monitors, clear out vents and maybe even clean your keyboard and mouse while you’re at it. Just getting rid of the dust can extend your computer’s life.

Make Your Progress Permanent

Once you’ve gotten your computer cleaned out, it’s worth taking a little time to make sure that it stays that way. One of the best options is to make sure that any tools you’re using are set up to run automatically — virus scanners, backups and so forth should be running regularly without you needing to remember to start them up.

Don’t forget to mark Clean Out Your Computer Day on the calendar for next year!

Photo by Flickr user PhotoOptik, licensed under CC BY 2.0.