why i’m against showing multiple concepts in design phase

everything is going awesome. you have agreed to do two concept designs for your ad campaign, your websites, your banner ads. you come up with a kickass concept that you’re worried you can’t beat with your second one. a week later, you rock out another solid concept, completely different than the first but still on brand. AWESOME.

you’re now rocking it with two completely different concepts that have different things happening. you have specific reasons for different scenarios and subtle inputs of awesomeness in each concept. time to lay these badboys out and present them to the client (whether it’s you, your creative director, account manager, or even someones mother).

everyone knows what happens next: “take this from concept 1, put it in concept 2, and then take this out of concept 2 and use that part from concept 1.”

what do you end up with? a bastardization of two designs, two completely different concepts. it’s like breeding a sheep and a bear – you end up with a giant mutant that eats babies and steals your fresh strawberries. not cool.

there are several issues that need to happen to solve this issue:

you must present your own work to the client, and listen to their reactions. if you haven’t read “Design is a Job”, read it. Mike will explain why you need to present your own work much better than I can.

you must take the feedback from the client and ask the right questions. we can’t sit back and take their piece by piece mashup of concept — we need to ask ourselves WHY they’re unhappy with the design, why are they unhappy with that header. coax it out of them. we must ask a lot of questions, we must dive deeper into the issues. it might make the client uncomfortable, it might make you uncomfortable — it doesn’t matter. we need to reach, to dig, to discover that core issue of what’s wrong with the design, and not simply take the client rearranging of content and concept.

can’t do either of these? are these out of your hand and control? i believe there are a several other solutions or workarounds to consider:

present only one design. as much as clients might not like it, and sometimes they want several, just tell them the cost benefits of doing one design first. present that design, and take their feedback. they won’t be able to piecemeal two concepts together if you only show them one.

present your designs very rough. this is something i have a hard time doing — i like to take a design and polish it right away. i like presenting full concepts, with real content and even dropdowns, flyouts and jquery UI enhancements; h0wever, i’m not sure this is the correct way. i believe that by presenting really rough overall ideas and having the client decide on a direction first, it would curb their desire to immediately start chopping up each design. as long as it’s well explained that they are for concept only, and to not focus on the little stuff, i believe this is a viable option as well.

the moral? mutants are cool, and sometimes they turn out okay (i consider any superhero a mutant, and you know, there are quite a few of them), but the large majority won’t turn out to have superhuman strength or x-ray vision. they’ll be bastard abominations that don’t communicate the original message you were trying to convey with the designs, and often much more convoluted and complex because of the process to get there.

disclaimer: i will, most likely, continue to always show multiple concepts in the design phase. i will, though, be better about the feedback and client education process involved and believe that 50% of what a designer does is that client interaction and feedback aspect.