I was in a website design meeying today and was finding that my mind was constantly drfiting to the beautiful rotating screensaver on my Apple computer. There were pictures of fish, lush palm fringed beaches, scantilly clad women in bikinis and all I could do from falling asleep in this meeting was to transcend my mind into these exotic and far flung palces. As graphic design sydney meetings go this one was going to be a long and arduous meeting. So waht constitutes a bad meeting? Firstly, I would say its when clients come in ill prepared.
They do not have a concise and clear web design brief and they spendthe majority of the meeting stumbling around their papers trying to find some cohesion in their notes. A second issue with meetings is when clients are unclear about what they want and expect you to pull the proverbial 'rabbit out of the hat' and come up with a design solution for them without any client input. The last thing that I really feel can kill a sydney web design or web development meeting is when clients refuse to listen. There are some clients who feel that it is better to just ramble on and on about their business for hours on end; without pausing in the vain hope that you might find some useful shrefs of information that may turn into a design later down the track. Its these clients who need to have centre stage I find are usually the hardest clients to deal with and are often the most demanding. When you do present a design they tend to wonder why we didnt get a clear design brief from them and the answer is that you were probably asleep.
Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
There are so many different types of persoalities and as graphic designers it is our job to read these personality types early on in the meeting and be as accomodating as possible even if it does mean enduring hours of frustrating meetings.
Hopping mad designs ( www.hoppingmad.com.au ) is a graphic design and website design studio based in Sydney offering a complete sydney web design and service. With a full team of qualified graphic designers we are able to offer bespoke and very stylish designs.
With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)