Your Designer Wants You to Know / Creative Freedom is Our Love Language

“I want my house to look exactly like this”. If you’re a designer, you’ve probably heard this time and time again. You meet with a client for the first time and they show you a photo they found on Pinterest and tell you they want nothing more than their home to look identical to it. We urge our clients to search and collect inspiration and we actually believe it’s a big phase in the design process that should not be skipped. However, there is a stark difference between gathering inspiration and placing your designer in a box.

Today we are talking about creative freedom and why it’s critical to offer to your designer.

First things first. Pigeon hole-ing your designer leaves little room for them to create a personalized design just for you. One of our favorite things about design is creating custom designs that mimic the way you and your family live. Everyone uses spaces a little differently. We want our designs to be beautiful, but we also want them to be functional. While you may like a certain layout or look of a space you find on Pinterest, it may not be a good fit for the space or your every day life. For example, you may love the look of a sectional, but you entertain often and need the flexibility of alternative seating. Part of our job is identifying these things alongside you and creating a flow and feel that works just for you. If you’re set on a particular image, you put us, your space, and yourself in a box.

If there is one thing your designer wants from you as a client, it’s trust. We have been doing this long enough that we can typically tell if a client wants to hire us and has hesitation in trusting us. While we certainly understand that design services are a big investment, hesitation shows your designer that you don’t trust them as your design team. Remember that the designers are the designers, not you. You’re paying us to use your inspiration in combination with our creative minds and professional experience to dream and innovate something new. If there’s a lack of trust, the design becomes limited and the process becomes taxing for both us and you.

All in all, give your designers some creative liberty. If you don’t feel like you can do that, maybe you need to build more trust with your designer before jumping into the execution of the project. We promise establishing this trust early on is key to a smooth design process.

If you are a designer and don’t feel like you have built trust with your clients, work hard to establish this early on in the process. Ask questions to help guide your clients, share as much information about how you work and what to expect up front. If you suspect your client doesn’t yet trust you, be honest and work together to come up with a process that you and them are both comfortable with. This will only help the process go smoother for both parties.

With that, there are always hiccups that occur during the design process, but we promise if you are giving your designer creative liberty,