Dear Client: This Book Will Teach You How to Get What You Want from Creative People

In a world where every business, brand, product, and service needs a strong visual identity, it’s critical for clients and creative professionals to work together. And the key to success, as with any relationship, is communication. In Dear Client, award-winning graphic designer Bonnie Siegler offers an invaluable step-by-step guide to how to talk so creatives will listen, and how to listen when creatives talk.

Written as a series of honest, friendly lessons—“Know What You Like,” “Decide Who Will Decide,” “Focus Groups Suck,” “Don’t Say ‘Make It Yellow,’ Say ‘Make It Sunny,’” “Serve Lunch During Lunchtime Meetings”—it shows exactly how to deal with the subjectivity, emotional pitfalls, and occasional chaos of a creative partnership. Here’s how to articulate your visual goals and set a clear, consistent direction. How to give feedback that works and avoid words that inhibit creative thinking. How to be open to something you didn’t imagine. And most of all, how to have fun, save money, and get the results you want.

Bonnie Siegler, voted one of the fifty most influential designers working today by Graphic Design USA, founded and runs the award-winning design studio Eight and a Half. She is best known for her design work for Saturday Night Live, the Criterion Collection, HBO, Late Night with Seth Meyers, StoryCorps, Participant Media, and Newsweek. Most recently, she was the creative director of the Trump parody memoir You Can’t Spell America Without Me by Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen and created the main title sequence for Will & Grace. She has taught at the graduate level for many years at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University, conducted workshops at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Rhode Island School of Design, and judged design competitions all over the place. She is the author of Signs of Resistance: A Visual History of Protest in America and Dear Client: This Book Will Teach You How to Get What You Want from Creative People. She is married to experimental filmmaker Jeff Scher, and they have two wonderful children, Buster and Oscar.