Concepts should go too far.
It is far easier to talk a client down from bold than to talk them up from safe. So we start further out than the final thing needs to be.
The standard way to present design concepts is to show three options that are all safely within range, let the client pick one, and then refine. It produces work that nobody objects to, which is a different thing from work that anyone wanted.
We do it the other way round. Our concepts deliberately go further than the final thing needs to go, sometimes considerably further. Not to be difficult, and not to make the safe option look reasonable by comparison. Because of what it does to the conversation.
What overshooting reveals
When you show someone a direction that is clearly too much, the feedback stops being about taste and starts being about limits. People tell you where the edge is, and that is far more useful than being told which of three near-identical options they slightly prefer.
Nobody has to fall in love with a whole concept to get the part they wanted.
It also breaks the assumption that you are choosing one and discarding the rest. In practice the client picks the parts they like from each direction, and we bring those together into a final idea before working through the rest of the site. The concepts are raw material, not finished proposals.
Winged Boots
Winged Boots came to us running black and gold with a light brown accent and a Times-based typeface. It looked like a lot of things. It did not look like them.
We kept the winged logo, because it was worth keeping, and changed everything around it. Blue and bright yellow replaced the black and gold. Raleway replaced Times. Presented cold, that would have been a hard sell. Presented as the moderate end of a set of directions that went further, it read as the sensible one.
- Show genuinely different directions, not variations on a single idea.
- Push at least one past where you expect to land.
- Say out loud that concepts are ingredients, not menus.
- Combine, then refine. The final thing usually contains three concepts.
The risk
You have to be willing to have a concept rejected outright, in the room, without treating it as a failure. If that is uncomfortable, you will start hedging, and hedged concepts are the ones that produce sites that look like everyone else’s.
The compensation is that clients end up somewhere they would never have specified in a brief, and can still explain exactly how they got there.
Three more
worth the time.
Account management exists to protect the people doing the work from the people paying for it. We took the opposite bet, and it changed how fast things move.
Content architecture is the least glamorous part of a project and the part that decides whether the site is still usable in three seasons.
Nobody tells you that you have been deprioritised. You notice the calls take longer to come back, and that the person who pitched you is on somebody else’s account now.