Brilliant advice as always Paul. I enjoy your podcast too BTW. Never miss it.

All good advice. I’d add that becoming good at “selling” your work is key. To me the best way to gain approval is to gain your clients’ respect and trust (using many of the the things you list here) and then “sell” them your design decisions. I use the word sell pretty lightly. What I do is explain and strongly defend my decisions when I’m presenting my work, kind of like establishing a legal defense. Be sure and take the time to explain and educate why decisions were made, etc. If you’ve done the things you mention above this is usually fairly straightforward.

The advice about having written explanation is also great – I don’t know how many times I’ve had something approved only to find out that it needed to be presented again to someone else without me there to control the feedback.

Another tip: tell your clients that they’re going to approve the design. Don’t ask them. Again, if you’ve done a job you’re willing to stand behind, and you’ve built that trust and respect, this almost always results in very quick approval. :)

Great list! I’ve been designing for years now and I’ve gotta say all of these resonated – I especially like #8: “present your designs”. I’m always shocked to see how a design can be read completely differently than what was intended… which isn’t always the client’s fault when you’re using make-believe content, lorem, and proxy images. Something a little walk-through is all that’s needed to push a client from “it’s alright” to “its Perfect!”. That coupled with #7 are surefire ways to improve your comp-batting average significantly. Thanks for the list :)

An excellent list, I especially like your first tip, telling clients what sort of feedback you expect from them. I’m going to use that! Thanks for your article :)

Spending more time to make one really good design is definitely the way to go. I never really did see the point of doing more.

Another pitfall is creating more than one of the same design with very minor variations. Unless they are color variations the client will not notice if one design featured shadows and glows and the other did not, or if one design used a different font set from the other, or if one had leaves as ornaments as opposed to flowers in the other. If anything this will only confuse the client and it only shows that you yourself are just as undecided as they are. So make up your mind and choose the one that you looks best.

Oh and definitely start a design with wireframes. They are a great time saver. This is also one of the reasons why I never needed to do more than 1 design, because the (note: approved) wireframe has already defined its general layout and structure, so the rest of the work is just adding colors, graphics, and whatever bells and whistles you may have to turn it into a beautiful design.

I pleased to hear I am not the only web designer who favours multiple iterations over multiple concepts (tip #4).

By producing multiple concepts, not only do you hazard the client mixing and matching between several designs, you run the risk of them picking a design in its entirety that is below par. The idea that it is possible to produce multiple concepts that are of equal merit is an optimistic one, and to trust the client to pick the best of the bunch is more optimistic still.

In my experience my first design usually contains my best ideas, and in subsequent concepts I either rehash the good ideas from the first design, strike out in an entirely different direction in an attempt to produce something that looks unique from the first design, or worst of all, knock out a sub-standard design simply to make up the numbers.

Today, if a client requests multiple concepts I steer them towards the “one concept, multiple revisions” approach instead.