Show what? The work, plans, or the door?[a goodbye to the client?]
A few good points are brought up by Jeffrey Zeldman at his daily report today, Don't design on spec
J.Z. gives a short story and adds,
The annals of the AIGA are filled with stories like this one.
A coincidence in timing, just last night an attendee of a Monday Multimedia Symposium at a local college asked a question similar to: What if the client would like to see a mock up or demo of their site?
Nightmares and horrors, yes.
I recall at least one or two less than optimal experiences from the past. These sour stories are great learning experiences, and cause us to reflect and refine our interactions with clients, proposals, agreements, projects, and time spent.
Sometimes the pre project discussions with a client will unearth BIG CLUES in how they deal or have dealt with others. These examples, and often intuition will usually, but not always, point to a client as a possible bad risk.
There were several people at the Multimedia meeting last night, from various aspects of web and media:a filmmaker, videographer, public access TV station guy, another young man who runs a web design business and works with copy, a woman who designs database solutions and standards-based web packages for companies, programmers, lan administrators, an instructor, artist, digital media guru, people wanting to get into the web or media business, etc ... and there were enough horror stories to pass around. The meeting topics were about Freelancing.
Ideas, tips, resources, success and horror stories were shared.
Several experiences and stories were horror projects, and sometimes clients, too.
An older, though interesting, article points up a few warning signals and ways to evaluate the potential client. Are Your Prospects Worthy? A column, written by Linda Formichellii.
Somewhere out there, is a story, about how to fire a client. I recall reading it a few years ago.
Ideally, it would be best not to get into any situation where relationships and communication could go very wrong.
So, show me your ideas, first? It does not seem like a good idea for many reasons. Examples of other work you have done should be adequate, and if one wants to do a bit of work for non profits, via grants or for free, there is the website Guidestar. A better or more positive way to build up experience and the portfolio.
Posted by Holly at January 27, 2004 04:10 PM | TrackBack