Do I Trust You? An Artist as a Client

I have been freelancing full-time as a graphic designer/illustrator for a few months now. My biggest source of frustration? The clients. Yes, I need them for the cash that sustains my microwave-meal lifestyle, but the moment I truly began to understand the absurd mentality of “Can you move that three pixels to the left?” was when I was getting my most recent tattoo. I was waiting for my tattoo artist to bring out a sketch of what we had discussed in generic terms, and I felt as though my heart would shatter into a million pixels if he showed me anything I was not expecting. Yet, this is also what I love about getting tattooed: awaiting the unexpected. I am still practicing the art of managing expectations, and getting tattooed has helped me to balance wanting control with trusting a service provider.

Many articles document client frustration, and while a late-night read may be able to dry some of those client-induced tears, we as service providers have the opportunity to impact client culture. Regardless of our own creative skill sets, we will always require a service provider at some point or another, so we must reframe collaboration as a form of trust.

Tattooing is a perfect example of trust. Some microscopic gunk is going to be suspended within a layer of your skin for the rest of your life; the stakes are a little higher and more personal than getting a new logo for your bakery or luxury pizza parlor. When you first see a tattoo sketch, you want full control over the image. But as I was sitting in the tattooist's chair, my experience as a  freelancer kicked in—I know the difficulty of having an overbearing and micromanaging client. 

When I first saw my tattoo artist’s design, I had two main concerns: size and peripheral details. The design he printed was larger than expected, and I knew I wanted something a little smaller. Instead of asking him to make it 38.5 percent of its current size, I simply asked him to to make it smaller. Additionally, as I wanted space on my arm for more tattoos, I was concerned about the details around the subject overwhelming the arm. I was assured that the design needed balance and a smooth integration into an otherwise empty space. My tattoo artist told me he would tattoo these last, and ultimately, that was a great choice.

My advice might seem too simplistic—of course you know how to tell someone you want something smaller, and I'm sure you know how to express concern over details. Often, however, as service providers ourselves, our own sense of experience and skills dismantle our ability to have conversations with our service providers. Many moments were spent suppressing my desire to snatch the drawing from him and redraw it because it seemingly took too much energy to express to someone what I believed I already knew so clearly.

Familiarity with technical jargon and the language of illustration could have easily become a crutch in my conversation with my tattoo artist. One of the worst kinds of clients to work with are those who spout jargon in an attempt to prove their knowledge. This is not useful to me as a designer, and I expect doing this would have not been useful to my tattoo artist. It would have been easy to bombard a fellow illustrator with technical jargon, to blurt specific numbers, to reference a different color range, to increase the contrast. 

In these moments, the desire to express knowledge is tied to our ego. When we ask a service provider to create for us, we believe that we have an incredibly clear vision of what we want and that someone just needs to make it happen. Incorrect. We hire others in order to collaborate. And part of being a good client is viewing collaboration as the goal of hiring rather than as a consequence of it. 

We all have skills worth sharing, and hiring a service provider does not necessarily expose any limits to your skill or knowledge. Of course, you can decide how much of a project you want control over. But if you want full control over how many half pixels are between an icon and text, then you probably don't want to hire someone. However, if you do, you are not just asking for their technical skill, you are asking for their opinion and unique perspective, their energy, and their trust.

So we return to my table where I spend hours communicating with my client in what I believe are whale noises, considering that nothing I am telling them seems to be getting through. “Move that three pixels to the left” is what I am faced with, and my experience as a designer is made fundamentally difficult. While the client probably has a clear sense of what they want, that “clarity” can be harmful, not just to the creative process, but ultimately to the integrity of what I am creating. When I am brought on as a designer, whether it be for storyboards, comics, posters, logos, brands, or tattoos, I am expecting collaboration. Obviously, I am not assuming that I have no room for growth or that client input is not helpful—we all have room to grow and learn. But there are a couple of characteristics of client-provider dialogue that hinder the act of collaboration. However, this is not new to any of you who have produced any sort of creative work in collaboration with others. We must respect an individual’s authority on a subject, and have open—rather than closed—critiques of what someone is doing or producing.

Telling me to move something three pixels to the left is as useless to me as me asking my tattoo artist to make something 38.5 percent smaller. Here, technical and hyper specific language is not as valuable as one might expect, and I have to place some trust in the expertise of my tattoo artist. Additionally, while arguing on a specific percentage reduction, the artist/designer/service provider is expending an immense amount of energy explaining a process that isn’t wholly scientific, a type of energy that would be much more useful actually drawing up a smaller version. 

Being a freelance creator has allowed me to integrate into a network of collaboration, and I have accepted the difficulty in balancing trust and knowing what you want. Now when I get a tattoo, I enter the space knowing that there is something beautiful in getting an image that doesn’t look exactly like what I expected—but in essence, concept, and design, it is exactly what I needed. I leave the space feeling as though I am heard. I leave the space knowing that something so personal is a product of two or more minds collaborating and trusting one another.

Artwork by Quim Paredes