Voted repeatedly as one of the most influential contemporary designers, Jessica is a partner at Sagmeister & Walsh.
Q:
You’ve done quite many large scale personal projects and people know your body of work very well. How does this influence your clients’ expectations when they first approach you?
It's great that our clients are aware of our work before they come to us! It means they know our capabilities and our range of different styles we work in and they know what to expect in term of the quality of work they'll receive. This helps the process, as our clients put a lot of trust in us knowing we've created a lot of large scale successful branding and advertising campaigns.
if our clients are aware of
our capabilities
they will know betterwhat to expect
ILLUSTRATION FROM twelve kinds of kindness Q:
How well are the clients prepared for the real design process, assessing sketches and creative ideas? How do you manage their expectations?
Some clients are better than others at understanding sketch/concept phases. Whenever we're doing larger projects, we tend to skip the sketch phase and render our ideas our in great detail in order to give our clients a complete picture of the final product.
If clients don’t understand the sketches,they might kill the work!
This requires a time and money effort on our end before approval which many agencies don't want to risk, but we feel it’s worth it. It helps us get better work made in the long run because sometimes clients kill work prematurely when they don't understand the sketches. It also helps us avoid misunderstandings and makes the process easier.
