Back to square one? (designer/client)

Zifnab

A friend and I are trying to put together a web design company, and we've encountered a situation with a client that I'm not entirely sure how to handle. We were contacted by a person that we will call Dave who was doing the graphic design work for a company that we shall call Acme Insurance. Dave did not feel confident in his ability to produce a web site and decided to hire someone else (us) to do it. Over the past four months, we've gone back and forth through various stages of design with Dave, redoing large chunks for various reasons. We finally came up with something that both he and us were relatively happy with and we spent the next month tweaking it. Unfortunately, every approval or change or contact with Dave takes forever. Send him an email, wait a week, etc etc. Also, his vision has been significantly different from ours the whole time, but that's fine. He's paying the bills, so we do what he wants, right? Three weeks ago, Dave said that almost everything was great and he was going to run the current design past Acme for their approval so that we can finish the site. The entire site is done and live on our test server waiting for the final changes.

Fast forward to today. I email Dave to touch base and to find out if we can go ahead and make the changes that he had wanted now a month ago. He replies with the news that his client hates the site. The whole design has to go and needs to be replaced with something completely new, preferably Flash-based. Dave has taken responsibility for most of the design issues, since everything they hate is something we fought to do 'our' way and ended up doing 'his' way, but that still leaves us in the lurch. We had approval from both Dave and (we thought) Acme to go through with the overall design we're currently working with. As far as we knew, everyone was happy and we were about to finish the site.

What I want to know is how to handle this now. In our contract we covered the fact that after certain checkpoints in the timeline, they couldn't make changes to certain things without renegotiation. We didn't expect them to get through to the third approval point and decide to change everything. Is it appropriate for us to say "Look, we've put four months into this already and it's going to cost you $XXX more to completely redesign from the ground up since it's basically a whole new job.", or do we have to suck it up and do another 2-3 months of work for free, even though it's not at all our fault? How do I handle this?

Lewisham

Zifnab wrote: »

What I want to know is how to handle this now. In our contract we covered the fact that after certain checkpoints in the timeline, they couldn't make changes to certain things without renegotiation. We didn't expect them to get through to the third approval point and decide to change everything. Is it appropriate for us to say "Look, we've put four months into this already and it's going to cost you $XXX more to completely redesign from the ground up since it's basically a whole new job.", or do we have to suck it up and do another 2-3 months of work for free, even though it's not at all our fault? How do I handle this?

First up: I hope you now know to expect this next time. Clients change their minds all the time. Negotiation as to how that should be accommodated is a big part of your work, and you should charge for it. Particularly as this is Dave's fault and not yours.

Did you get a lawyer to write this contract? You should.

Stick to your guns, ask for the money. 2-3 months without pay is a long time. Hopefully they will be reasonable. If not, they might threaten to slug it out in court. At which point, you have to evaluate whether:

a) Your contract will hold up to allow you to get money.
b) Fighting in court costs less than just doing the site.

desperaterobots

So long as you've had those people sign off on everything it's perfectly reasonable to request compensation for any new work. Been through this. It blows.

Blake T

Legally you stand as this.

You do not work for the client.

You are working for Dave.

You have done exactly what work Dave has asked for.

You deserve to be paid for this work.

If Dave requires you to do additional work, you need to be paid to do so.

You should not give a shit what is going on in the clusterfuck between Dave and his client. It's Dave fault that he has failed to deliver the required product to the client.

wakkawa

You made the site they asked for. Get paid for it.

They want you to make another? Get paid for that one too.

EDIT: haha thats why I don't post late at night.

Szechuanosaurus

Paid.

But yes, other than that wakkawa is completely correct.

Of course, the real lesson here is never work with Dave again. He's a fucking horrendous account handler and the blame rests firmly at his feet for this debacle of miscommunication. How on earth did it ever get this far before discovering that you were heading in completely the wrong direction for the client, Dave?

Remember: The most important asset you have as a designer is your self-respect. Defend it assiduously and only good things will happen. Forfeit your self-respect and all the world's shit will roll downhill to you.

Lewisham

If you want to never work with a Dave, you'd have to close down business because you wouldn't have any clients at all.

Szechuanosaurus

Lewisham wrote: »

If you want to never work with a Dave, you'd have to close down business because you wouldn't have any clients at all.

Nonsense. This could have been avoided with thorough contracts, briefs and communication.

You draw up a contract which outlines when you get paid.
You tie that to a brief which details exactly what you are going to do for the client and which the client signs off before you start working.
You communicate regularly with the client to ensure that their goals haven't changed since the original contract and brief and that the work you will be pitching to them will be consistent with what they expected.

If you plan on running an amateur outfit then sure, the only business you'll get is bad business. No design project runs flawlessly, but it sounds like this one was an unmitigated disaster and professional design companies do not operate that way.

Zifnab

Thanks for the quick responses, guys. It's good to know that we're 'in the right' here, as it were. Now I just need to figure out how to break this to my partner, since he's going to be seriously pissed...

I've been going back through our communication with Dave, trying to figure out where this went wrong so that we can avoid this situation the second time around, and I think I have it figured out. We were working with a different design at one point, and Dave ran that one past Acme. They liked it and we moved forward with it. About a month later, Dave came to us and basically said "Look, I don't feel like you're understanding my vision at all. I've produced a general design, make it look like that instead." Since Dave hired us, we assumed that what he wanted was what Acme wanted, so we agreed and moved ahead with that one instead. As far as I can tell, Acme never saw this new design and had no idea that we were using it instead of the one that they had seen earlier in the process. I think this is where things started going dreadfully wrong.

I think the lesson here is "Be wary of being a subcontractor who isn't in direct communication with the final client." Talk about a great learning experience, eh?

devoir

I know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I'd just like to add one point that may or may not have been covered explicitly. I do work on a similar basis to yourself. My time is allocated to clients who request tasks be done, I complete them and they pay my employer for my time.

As a rule, we never communicate through a third party. Communication is always with the client that is going to end up with the work, even if someone else is paying for it. An example is we had to integrate Organisation B's systems with Organisation A. Organisation A brought us on to do the work, but we dealt with both Organisation A and Organisation B to ensure that there was no miscommunication or screwups, even though it was Organisation A that was actually paying for all our work.

In your situation, our procedures would have dictated that we had some kind of contact with Acme, included them in any agreements and essentially worked it as a three party arrangement in which they would have a copy of all correspondence between yourself and Dave (as the rule, but there are a couple of small exceptions). If they trust Dave, that's fine, they can ignore the correspondence and you deal through Dave. But the onus is then on them if they don't take advantage of the information flow that is available to them, and you have a stronger position when something like what has happened kinda goes kaboom.

Zifnab

Yeah, when we were first working all of this out, I had said to Dave that we prefer to work at least somewhat with the final client, in this case Acme, since it lets us make sure that everything is good to go. Dave ensured us that he had been given complete creative control over the project and that they would accept whatever he approved. We weren't entirely comfortable with this, but we were young and naive and went ahead anyhow. It's beginning to look like this was a terrible mistake. I think that part of the problem is that Dave is just a guy who does some graphic design to pay his bills, and I'm getting the feeling more and more that Acme is just three dudes in a warehouse somewhere who don't really know a whole lot about the business end of things. Is there a way to go back in time to March and turn this gig down?

Also, I'm meeting with Dave tomorrow to discuss this, so we'll see how this works out. I'm going to insist on contact between us and Acme as part of the renegotiation as well as the money part, I think.