Smashing Magazine recently published an article called “Why Design by Commitee Should Die“. It seems like a perfectly reasonable argument until you probe deeper, and realize the whole thing is just a straw man, and what’s really going on is just another round of “blame the client”, a favorite game of many designers.
One of the cardinal rules of good blogging is that you should always start out your article by quoting Wikipedia. People associate references with academic research work, so this will give your writing an aura of reliability and seriousness. So here goes: Wikipedia defines a Straw man as “an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position”. And it goes on informing us that:
To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar yet weaker proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
I don’t know what this has to do with actual straw men, other than maybe saying that people who fall for this have the same intellectual capacities as birds.
Burning down the straw man
In this case, the author of that Smashing Magazine blog post created the illusion of refuting the idea of design by committee, when in fact all along the idea he really attacks is that “people with weak design skills should not make design decisions“. This second idea may appear similar to the first one, but it’s a much easier point to make.
Let me explain. Here are some of the examples of design by committee quoted by that article:
My wife wants more circles.
My husband says it doesn’t hit him in the gut.
My kids say there are too many words.
My dog didn’t wag its tail.
Does any of those sound like something a profesional designer would say? I didn’t think so. Those are not example of design by committee, those are just examples of design by non-designers. If the client wants a bigger logo and it’s a bad idea, that in itself is not a problem. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, especially if it’s their own business and they think size of that logo will have an influence on their ability to put food on the table.
What the real problem is
So the problem is not clients making suggestions (good or bad). The problem is you, the designer, not having the authority to make the final decision on the size of that logo.
It’s not a question of stupid clients and smart designers, or the reverse. What was lost in all the funny client quotes is the fact that design by committee can be a huge problem even between highly competent designers.
Let’s take the classic examples: Microsoft versus Apple. Do you really think Microsoft employees are all pointy-haired managers who want to make the logo bigger and stick talking paper clips in all their products? And that Apple is only staffed by thousands of highly competent designers, plus maybe one or two guys to build the actual iPhones? Of course not. Yet it’s obvious that Apple is more successful than Microsoft at designing appealing products.
Microsoft doesn’t lack competent designers, it lacks a Steve Jobs figure that values good design, and solves the problem of design by committee by having the final say. Associating the issue of design by committee with bad client ideas and incompetence actually hurts our chances of recognizing and solving it.
The solution
To me, being a designer is a little like being a doctor. Both save lives, have dozens of TV shows dedicated to their profession, make a ton of money, and are highly regarded in society. Wait, no, actually designers are not at all like doctors. Well except maybe for one thing, their relationship to the client.
Like a doctor, we are hired for our experience and knowledge in a specific field. That knowledge wasn’t easy to get, and we might feel a little disrespected when the client thinks he knows better than us.
But we should remember that like a doctor, we know much less about the patient’s own life than he does. He might know which medicine he’s allergic to, or that he already had those symptoms before. Disregarding this info just because the client has not been through med school would be foolish.
And we should also remember that just as a doctor’s decision will affect the patient’s health and not his own, our design decisions will mainly affect the client’s business and much less ours.
So the solution is not to disregard a client’s idea, not matter how stupid it might seem to us. As profesional designers, we should be able to explain the reason why that idea is not suitable to the current project. Even if that reason is “I just feel like this is not the right direction, please trust me on this one” it’s better than dismissing the idea straight away (and much better than implementing it and then blaming the stupid client when the project fails).
Even Steve Jobs gives a reason when he makes a decision. Namely, “I’m Steve Jobs. Do it.“.
Kyle
It gives me hope for the web design community when people write articles Ike this. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the client-bashing attitude, especially when it’s being propagated by high-readership blogs like Smashing Magazine.
Also i think it’s called a “straw man” argument because straw men are really easy to beat up, and it still appears like you’re beating up something real.