Just Say What You Mean...

Interestingly, I am quite busy at the moment and have therefore neglected my posting here on “Times We At.” Presently, I am doing a lot of remodeling of my upper floor at the shop in order to convert it to a more comfortable design studio. For the past year or so, my office has been on the lower floor next to the metal shop. I have reached my limit cleaning the metal dust out of my fax, laptop, plotter, music server, telephone, etc. The upstairs has been totally underutilized and provides an excellent space for setting up a really nice workstation as well as a full-service bar - complete with pool table if Mike comes through…

I am on a mission to finish two projects before Christmas that have been hanging around too long: a new backbar for Hush Lounge (the original one was designed and built in like, 25 minutes the day the club opened and was never what I actually wanted to do), and finishing an additional piece of awning for the Source 4 project. I just finished up a beautiful stainless steel handrailing for a home in Boulder last week that turned out great. Waiting on a check from that one –-

Every day, I make mental as well as physical notes about the state of custom design and build and the issues that apply to this blog. There is a ton of information I would love to work into this format but the problem I have is that a lot of it is getting much more political as well as what some would consider more controversial. You know, the design business can really suck. The reason for that is the subjectivity that clients and creatives apply to the design process. That makes for some fairly tense relationships in the process. Add to that the large amounts of money involved and you have a recipe for disaster if management is not on top of Everything.

I would love to talk about the sorry state of custom design here in Denver right now. Nothing cool is really happening. Mostly, it is a three-year lag of re-hashed ideas that showed up in design picture books a long time ago. Did I ever mention the time when I was designing a large LoDo nightclub that shall remain nameless because whenever someone searches for it, then they’ll come directly to this blog but suffice to say, they try and keep palm trees on their patio year round in this climate and so by late October they are totally dead so they need to be replaced again in the late spring. Duh. At any rate, the owner had all these grandiose ideas that came from – you guessed it – a couple of five year old cheesy picture books on Nightclub Design. All the pages were dutifully marked with post it notes and highlighted the over-trendy crap that made places in South Beach famous for about five minutes. As a designer, you have to quietly oblige the obligatory ramblings of an owner hell-bent on reproducing trend. Most of the club owners in Denver basically have based their clubs (as well as the names) on existing models. So much for innovation. Bottom line: what a bore.

There is another club owner who thinks that just because he throws a rooftop patio on top of his building that, miraculously, the hip factor goes up and instantaneously the coolness of his tired, overdone concept that looks like the 20 or 30 other clubs in town will bring in 5 or 10 new people from the already tapped club demographic here in town. What this dufus never realizes is that for nine months out of the year, nobody cares about sitting outside on his rotting patio furniture that eventually crumbles from the rain and snow and street dirt that continually attacks it throughout the cold months. For most of the year, the patios sit neglected, full of debris and dirty furniture adding to the overall impression of schlock and second-rate service these places exhibit.

However, I really have to question my choice in berating the very clients and projects that pay my bills. Probably not the smartest marketing approach in the history of business. The last two items I spoke about do not worry me because I’ll never work with either owners again and could not care less what they think of me. Club owners, as a group, are notorious for taking credit for the design of their clubs anyways. They never give credit to the designer unless they are unhappy about some aspect of the design. Then they blame the designer even if it was they who made the bad choice or decision. I am used to that. The only owners I have encountered who did not do that was Terry Martin and Michael Olsen who own Hush. They have done a great job in promoting the design of the club and crediting my work at the same time. This could be due to the fact that this is their first club and they are relatively new to the industry. Ask me again after they have done it for 10 years. The nightclub industry has a way of corrupting even the most nicest souls into a bleak wasteland of distrust and negativity. I have witnessed it first-hand. I have seen a particular club owner lose a lot: his friends, family, and faithful employees because he can’t live in the reality outside his dance floor anymore. He has, at some level, cheated everyone and so now he himself can not trust. He views everyone he meets as a dubious threat to his existence. What a sad way to live.

I still maintain that the design business is cool regardless of the few clients who truly suck. Most design firm marketing jargon and bullshit always talks up this crap about how great a firm’s client relationships are to the extent of fawning over the client’s every action, choice, and decision. I know that is quite untrue and it is because of what I mentioned at the beginning of this article – the client/designer relationship and the subjectivity that glues that relationship together. For every “success” story a design firm tells, there will be 1.5 to 2 that fail. I don’t mean “fail” in the sense that the project was not delivered or not paid for. By fail in this sense, I mean there is a party, either the client or the designer, who, after the project was completed, paid for and consumed, has made the conscious decision that they would not do business with the other again. It is like a date that went OK but not really what one or either expected: everyone goes home, maybe even kisses goodnight, then know intrinsically that date will never happen again.

Which now brings me to my point. I feel that to honestly write about the design business I have to piss someone off. Maybe even a potential client. But really, after doing this for fifteen years now, I have seen my share of good relationships and bad relationships. I have modified my standard contracts to acknowledge this and protect both myself as well as the client from some of the pitfalls of this subjective world. I have become wiser with whom and what I will deal with in this business. In essence, I guess I don’t care if some potential client reads this blog and has a better understanding of where I am coming from or my sometimes extreme ideas on business come from. If that client has control issues or is afraid to make the decision to use my services, there is probably underlying factors that would lead to problems down the road.

One of the fundamental principles of the design service industry is to communicate. This means spelling out everything in closely-worded contracts, agreements, documentation, as well as personal one-to-one meetings that seek to eliminate all that ugly subjectivity. Can you really eliminate it? Not a chance so long as two parties involved in determining and interpreting beauty on a functional level are exchanging money for services at the uppermost pinnacle of ego-driven outcomes. We just have accept its presence and not be afraid to say what we want.