An old joke:
Person 1: “I was just thinking…”
Person 2 interrupts, saying: “We don’t have time to waste!”
Anyway, as a blogger I can start out with “I was just thinking” and not have anyone come in with a silly joke, so here goes:
I was just thinking yesterday about client feedback and whether it is to be taken as an insult or as a normal part of business. People feel differently about this issue. I’ve been known to say in the past that working back and forth with a client on design issues such as color choices is a part of doing business in the mapping field.
However, yesterday I tweeted about an article in the Washington Post (via @geofeminina), that quotes a map artist as saying, “I’ve had to occasionally call somebody up after they’ve used a computer program to alter the color or proportions and say, ‘Take my name off of it. That isn’t how I painted it.”
The map artist quoted here is none other than the person who makes most of the ski trail maps around the world. He’s obviously quite an expert at it. My tweet was: “Even the masters have clients who want to change their colors! Insulting.”
So in this particular case I found it insulting. But I also feel that back-and-forth between client and map maker is a perfectly acceptable part of doing business.* Why is there a discrepancy? Is it because this guy is an obvious expert? No, I think that the real reason this was insulting is that his work was altered after he submitted it. Ideally, the client would have asked to change colors before the piece was finished.
Interior designers, architects, and landscape architects will often say things like, “I loved the client for this project, he was decisive and open to suggestion” – which leads us to believe that these fields all expect a collaborative approach to project work rather than a one-sided situation. Map making needs to have the same type of expectation toward collaboration with the client. Furthermore, in one of these other fields, I do think it would be insulting if say, you designed someone’s interior, then they turned around and put in, say some garish focal piece, and then they published it in a magazine along with your name. That just seems sneaky. So there’s the difference that I see between the two situations. What do you think?
*I run my business that way: all client feedback is welcome at all times.
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