Speaker 1: Welcome to Design Domination, where you'll learn to become a better, more business savvy designer so you can dominate your competition. Hi and thanks for tuning in. I'm Colleen Grotzer and in this episode of Design Domination, I'm going to give you some ways to reduce the amount of revisions with client projects. Stick around to find out how you can say goodbye to the days of final, final, final files and wrangling with tons of revisions and have a happier client relationship. Excessive client edits can be frustrating and a time suck. They can really derail a project and even eat into another project's schedule. Not only that, but they can quickly make a project less profitable or unprofitable depending on how you priced it and scoped it out. Getting a lot of revisions from a client can mean many things. One, it can mean that the client isn't organized. Two, it can mean the client doesn't have a copy editor or proofreader. Three, it could be that they simply won't have certain information available until the last minute. Four, it could mean they just feel the need to exercise control. Or five, it could also be that they feel like they're getting more for their money when they ask you to make more revisions. I've actually been told this by a client before. On the other hand, it could be you. Maybe you didn't lead the project well or at all. Maybe you didn't do your best work. Or maybe you need to up your skills. Regardless of the cause though, it may surprise you that there are quite a few things that you can do to help prevent tons of revisions. The first is to ask the right questions upfront. That also puts you in a proactive position of leading the process instead of the other way around. And when you're in that position, the client views you as an expert, not an order taker. When clients nitpick and art direct your designs, for example, the client asks you to make something bold or red or whatever, rather than leaving it up to you to decide how to best resolve that underlying issue, that's often a sign that you didn't ask the right questions upfront, if you asked any at all. A lot of these requests may be based on their opinions and personal preferences instead of something objective, such as the creative brief. But it could also be a sign that your design missed the mark. When you ask the right questions upfront, you know who you're designing for and why. And if you don't know which questions to ask, be sure to get my free guide, 17 questions you must ask during a design consultation at creative-boost.com slash questions. The second thing you can do is set expectations of what you want to get. Remember, you do this work every day, clients don't. Clients are usually very well-meaning and want to help, but they need guidance. So let them know what you need. If you want final copy, ask for it. But you must define what final means, because as you know, what we say and mean is not always what they say and mean. So it only helps both parties to be really clear. Otherwise we know how that can go. I mean, how many times have you had a final, final, really final file or been sent draft text to quote unquote help you get started? So I ask for final proofread copy. The other thing is what constitutes a revision. Some clients may think that that means any type of edit. Others may think it's okay to rewrite everything or send a whole new file after the layout is done. Another thing you can do is limit the amount of included revisions in your agreements by number of drafts or time to make them, for example. And anything outside of that is at a cost, which should be specified too. Now I know some designers who don't do this or they offer unlimited revisions, and that's fine. If that's profitable for you, that's what matters. If you've worked with a client before and they don't make excessive edits, then you could do this. For most projects, I include two rounds of revisions and say of decreasing complexity. I changed my contracts to say this immediately after a nightmare brochure project where the client decided on the second round to send all new copy for the brochure. I don't recall if I didn't put my foot down because technically my contract didn't preclude them from doing this, or maybe they pushed back when I said something. But to them, it was just another round of revisions. And to me, it was a whole new layout. So now saying of decreasing complexity lets them know that the number and complexity of edits should decrease with each proof, not increase. No redesigning on the second draft, for instance. Another thing you can do is limit the number of contacts. The client might need to have others review a design proof, but that doesn't mean you want five people to send you edits. What I've seen happen in these situations is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Someone inadvertently goes rogue and makes edits that another point of contact disagrees with. And it never ends well. When you limit the number of contacts who are in charge of sending you the edits, that leaves it up to them to compile the edits and go through which ones are okay and which ones are not. A fifth thing that you can do is check your work. Now earlier I mentioned how a client might nitpick or art direct your designs if you didn't ask the right questions up front. But it could also be because your design work is not up to par from a technical standpoint. Maybe the styling you use for body text is inconsistent in some spots, for example. Maybe you almost lined up some boxes on a page but didn't quite get there. So you might need to tighten up your technical skills. Clients shouldn't have to point out these types of things and tell you to clean up your work. You're supposed to be the expert and they're paying you for that expertise, not to tell you how to do your job. Could you imagine if you hired a painter to come paint a room in your home and you had to keep telling him he missed a spot? You might be like, but this is his job. Why doesn't he already see this? The other thing to check with your work is the content. Did you leave anything out that the client sent you? Did you follow any special instructions they may have given you? Did you put everything where it's supposed to go? Did you make sure that words that are supposed to be in italics or superscript, or whatever the case might be, appear that way in the layout? Did you check any special symbols or accent marks for words in other languages? We work on a lot of medical publications with Greek symbols that we need to check. In the past, I've often spent more time checking my work than working on the actual layout. And sometimes this can be dozens of hours in a large project. Now if you really stink at looking for discrepancies in files, like between the client content and your layout, well heck, even if you already have an eagle eye for details like I do, I have an amazing solution for you. You can do this by saving client text files such as Word as PDFs. And then open the one that you want to check and open the PDF of your design proof. And then in Acrobat, go to View, Compare Files. Select the PDF of the client's file for the old file, and then your layout PDF for the new file. You can adjust the settings, such as if you only want it to look for differences in text and not styling. And then you'll get a report showing the differences. Now if you don't use Acrobat, check out draftable.com slash compare. This works very similar to Acrobat's Compare Files feature, and it's free with some limitations. Alternatively, you could take the PDF of your design proof and save that as a Microsoft Word document, and then compare the client's text document in Word by going to Track Changes and then Compare Documents. That may or may not be in the same place like where you do it in the latest version, but I don't have the latest version. Now with any of these methods, you still have to weed through the findings in the report to see if they're accurate or not. But let me tell you, this saves hours of doing it yourself and hoping that you'll catch everything. This is a game changer. So always check your work. And even if you've already checked your design work in the layout file, in InDesign for example, you'll often spot things in a PDF proof that you didn't catch in the layout file. It just gives you a different perspective. Now if you want to see screenshots of any of these methods I mentioned, just go to creative-boost.com and click on the episode page. A sixth thing that you can do is present your work. I have found that presenting the work to a client results in a lot fewer design changes. When you take the step of actually presenting your work and explaining how it aligns with a creative brief and their objectives, you get less pushback. I won't go into too much more of that here because I did an entire episode on presenting your design work to clients. And that was episode 24, seven mistakes when presenting design work and asking for critique, which you can go check out. Another thing you can do is point out errors if you see them. If you spot something, question it upfront, before or when you send the proof. For instance, we put notes in the design proofs letting the clients know that we corrected a misspelling. And there are four reasons that we point this out. One is because sometimes what you think is a misspelled word really isn't. Now I've always been a stickler for spelling, but one time I was wrong. Second is that it lets them know so that they can change it if they use that same copy elsewhere, like in another publication or on a website. Third, it reinforces your expert status. You're being proactive, not waiting for them to request edits. And four, it shows that you care about the quality of your work and helping them, which is something clients will come back for again and again. Number eight is get a formal sign-off. If a client is making what seems to be never-ending edits, have them sign and send back a form. Having them jump through a bit of a hoop can make them think twice about making more edits and taking more time to get all their edits together at one time. If they balk, say, oh, you're happy to make the additional edits, but that it's your policy to get approval after, you know, X number of rounds of edits or however you'd like to word that. Another way you can reduce client revisions is to anticipate questions. If you think something could potentially be an issue, bring it up with the first proof, if not before. If you think it might be an issue, they might think so too. But they may not say something until much later in the process, and you don't want to get too deep in the weeds and then have to redo a lot of work later or go through another round of edits if you don't have to. You know, I mentioned earlier in the episode that some clients just feel the need to exert control over something and will just make excessive edits. If you've never encountered this, great. I hope you never do. There's probably nothing you can do about those types of edits, other than you might reconsider working with those clients. But in the majority of situations, there's so much you can do to reduce the number of revisions and maintain control over the project, which means your projects will be more profitable. Be sure to check out episode 71 on how to manage the revision process better. If this was helpful to you, I'd love to hear from you. And could I ask a favor? Could you hop on over to iTunes or whichever platform you listen on and leave a review for the podcast?