All client projects are collaborations. As a designer, your job is to toss clay pigeons into the air for your client to shoot at, dust off what can be salvaged, build a new clay pigeon, and toss again. If you have more artist in you than designer, you’ll never survive the process.
Clients might not always know exactly what they want, but show them a draft of what you think they want and they’ll certainly tell you what they don’t like about it. You might not always agree with the things they don’t like or the reasons they don’t like it, but that criticism, for me, has never failed to improve a design.
Here’s a case study describing the process, decisions, and thoughts behind one particular design that went on to serve as a platform for ten other company products.
REACH needed a design for a promotional t-shirt that presented their airplanes as well as their helicopters. Along with that, they gave me two other things to work with: the company name and a motto. My first mental image was to have a helicopter and plane flying out of the t-shirt instead of the standard side view. Since I didn’t already have any illustrations
of their planes in my library and none of their helicopters from that angle, I had to create them from scratch for the first draft.
My primary goal for the first draft was to get the idea and perspective for the helicopter and plane approved because they would require the most time to develop because of the detail involved. It took several hours to build the plane and the helicopter and the company name. I added just enough detail to the aircraft so they wouldn’t look too cartoonish and put them against a simple gray background. With the helicopter and plane concept approved, we were free to move on to the next part of the design. Moving on, we ended up 
changing the directions of the aircraft so they were facing in the opposite directions and put the company name in the center to separate them. I also sent along a couple of designs incorporating the company’s official to see whether or not they thought it would be a good idea. One version had a blue square with lines and the other a blue circle with lines just for added color and design. Interestingly, seeing the company logo now incorporated into design, they sent me a correction that to reversed their opinion on the placement of the aircraft. They also scribbled out the star of life and redrew the triangle without the circle or the square.
At this point, we had the aircraft figured out and found a way to incorporate the company logo. I sent a redesign and waited for a reply. In the meantime, I started playing around with a few other ideas – not quite satisfied with what we had. There was still something missing; something to tie it all together. There was something about the circle I really liked, and I thought the lines added some class as well, but the execution was wrong. So what did I do? I came up with a completely different design, incorporating the core elements, but adding elements I felt the design really needed, including couple ideas that had been discarded earlier on.
Now this was something I could live with and I emailed it to them before they even had a chance to get back to me on what I had sent previously. We were obviously headed down the right road because my next email included a correction to the design instead of an outright no. Lose the ribbon, lose the MEDIPLANE, lose the star of life and add a cudusa, put the mottos inside the circle, and do you think we can make the triangle work with the circle? Oh, and get rid of those lines…
After a few more exchanges and tweaks, we ended up with a solid design that became the inspiration for a number of offshoots including pins, keychains, the new crew patch, and the company Christmas card. 
Total collaboration and design time: 2 weeks.
Software: Adobe Illustrator
To see other products based on this design, see Reach Medical Services
[Illustration: Eric Lian]
