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Hi, I am in my final year of a degree in Graphic Design and I am becoming increasingly concerned! I seem to produce work that my lecturers love but clients don't. Almost 100% of the time I am told by lecturers that I come up with exactly what they are getting at - that my work goes beyond the brief and is creative and original, but I am increasingly met with responses from clients that my work is too bold and unexpected and they choose what I would consider the most boring and typical solutions instead! In fact they seem to choose designs that are just carbon copies of what already exists out there

designs that I believe will take them nowhere.

I want to create original work and I put a great deal of time into coming up with concepts that meet clients needs and take them beyond, while others in my year simply find aesthetically pleasing examples to copy, and their work gets chosen! I am not interested in doing typical, boring solutions that people are expecting to see and certainly am not interested in copying other people's solutions for other people's problems! I wish to create a new perspective and yet it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that to start working in this industry I will have to change my work to become the run-of-the-mill, stock-standard response!

Please, if you could find some time in your busy schedule, any comments or offers of hope! would be greatly appreciated - design is everything, everything, everything to me and I want to make a meaningful contribution to the field, not just merely be in it!

Let's start with the bad news first - "they seem to choose designs that are just carbon copies of what already exists"

Most businesse (clients) probably don't want to be innovative or competitive leaders. I reckon most of them just want to make money (somehow), and have decided that the simplest way to do that is to copy someone else. For a lot of people, not only is that the simplest way, it's also probably the most sensible way. What I mean, in a kinda brutal Darwinian sense, is that for there to be a 'top 10%' there also has to be a bottom 90%. Looking at the problem that way means you may have to be a lot more proactive in selecting clients to work for, because the odds that leaving client selection to chance will disappoint you more often than not.

Without more information from you on exactly how you present your work to clients, it's kinda tricky for me to comment, but I will take a punt on the answer anyway. My guess is that you try to let "the work speak for itself." This, quite bluntly, is a very big mistake and one that many designers make. Innovative design actually needs more attention paid to the rationale, simply because it is, by definition, less derivative and therefore harder for people to understand by looking at everything else around it.

Put yourself in the client's shoes for a minute: you have a business that needs to communicate two potentially contradictory messages. The first message is about what the business does (like many other businesses in the same industry), the second message is that the business is somehow different, unique and therefore 'better'. Resolving these two messages with a single design is not easy, and for non-visual thinkers (ie. clients) it can be exceptionally difficult. So that puts the onus on the designer, or studio, to walk the client carefully through the verbal & visual logic that starts with what everyone else is already doing, and ends up with a genuinely innovative solution. Tricky.

Get used to it. Pardon my cynicism, but this is as good a definition of 'mass market' as I have come across in a while. And the problem with mass market is that it is, by definition, what most people are doing. Innovators in any industry will always represent a small fraction of the total activity within that industry - your problem is finding the innovators, and being disciplined enough to walk away from churn-n-burn work.

I absolutely and vehemently disagree with your conclusion here! I would interpret this situation differently. I would suggest that you'll find it a lot tougher than average to find the right studio and clients, but not impossible. I would strongly suggest you start by finding an innovative studio to work in and refine both your craft, creative and client skills. The risk you run of trying to start a business straight out of college is that you will end up 'selling out' to pay the rent, and then end up bitter and twisted (okay, so maybe that's a little extreme, but hopefully you take my point).

Don't set yourself up for permanent professional heartbreak by believing that all (or even most) business people are as passionate about what they do as designers' are - in my experience it just ain't so. What you can do however, is use your own passion as a guide to help you judge whether or not the client is equally passionate, that way at least you'll be working with someone who is as into their work as you are. A small word of caution though, great passion doesn't necessarily mean great business sense, so this is a potentially financially risky way to build a client base.

Orange is a UK-based mobile phone company that started a few years ago. Wolff Olins did the name and design. There is nothing about the name or visual communication that actually says 'we are a mobile phone network.' But it works brilliantly against BT (British Telecom) and Vodafone because it assumes that people are intelligent enough to 'get' that it is a mobile phone co (it says so in its advertising and brochures) and therefore the ID focusses purely on the positioning of the company relative to the more obviously named competitors. Their basic strategy has been to position themselves as the alternative for people who don't necessarily prefer to stolidity of the the big two. It has been pretty successful.

Contrast that approach with One.Tel in Australia. These guys have a really simple strategy - 'whatever you buy from Telstra or Optus or Vodafone, we can do cheaper.' This is clearly a 'me-too' approach, and the company name shows it. The ID itself is, in my humble opinion, pretty ordinary, but I am not sure that that matters given their strategy. They only want people to recognise that they are a cheaper telephone company, not necessarily one with a greatly different personality or anything tricky like that. They too have been pretty successful.

So it's really case of the design matching the strategy. If you want to play with innovative clients, make sure that you understand any prospect's strategy and avoid the 'me-toos'.

Good luck!

"The skill of realistic thinking is a key factor of success in the graphic design industry. We are not the creators of an end product, unless we are actually creating one-off works for an exhibition or gallery - in which case, we're not commercial artists in the first place.

Our role is to provide imagery that helps to sell the end product, that's all. As such, we're just a cog in a bigger machine. Yes, we're an important cog, but in the client's and the public's minds, we're certainly not the most important cog.

We have to be prepared to approach our job as just that - a job. Any opportunity to be passionate about it, is a bonus. I'm not advocating that we remain cynical and mundane, but by using our talents for commercial purposes, we have crossed the line from "art" to "trade", and should operate accordingly. As such, all the normal facets of commerce apply, including the professional acceptance of rejection and reinvention.

Try and see the funny side: When I was in college, our class was told by the lecturer (tongue-in-cheek), that we could not call ourselves real commercial artists until the day came when a publican commissioned us to design an "ICE" sign complete with snow-covered lettering. That was 15 years' ago.

Sure enough, a few years into my career, I got that inevitable commission! I take heart in the fact that, despite the thousands of "ICE" signs out there, no two are exactly alike! And mine is still on display."

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