You are the most beautiful girl in the world

A friend of mine, back in Serbia, is the best design salesmen I ever meet. What he will do, he will first show design to the client and say”Isn’t it beautiful. Look how it is beautiful”. He will always start conversation with those two sentences that are nothing more than bullshit, but somehow have the power to “hypnotize” the client.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I am the one taking rational approach, trying to explain my choices and have hard time to sell, and his approach is ridicules, but he is selling with no problem. Our rational choices, doesn’t ring in clients head. What is rational any way? Using blue for airline because you wanted to symbolize the sky? Sky can be yellow, purple, red, maroon, orange, black, white … Even if client perfectly understand everything we are saying and agrees with our design, he or she will say I don’t like how it looks like, or I don’t like your color choice, something with LIKE, what ever, like, like, like…. Like, taste and beauty always go with our job and I understand that esthetics is a part of it. Frankly I think beauty is not important because it doesn’t mean anything.

“You are the most beautiful girl in the world, which doesn’t say much about you.” - said Groucho Marks.

However, since design is the business, we have two choices:
1) to deal with LIKE and do something that doesn’t goes together with our “rational” choices
2) lose the client.

And, don’t forget, clients chose us and we don’t choose the client.
I guess they like something about us - “I like your work. It’s so beautiful”-:)

One more thing. I agree with Steve that is very helpful having clients involved in design process. That is nothing more than truing to understand clients problems and their needs.