Give samples of well designed work and point them to sites with well designed work. You can only lead the horse to the water but you can’t make him drink. You might be fighting a loosing battle, so pick your fights.

People who are know-it-alls are hard to educate.
I have been fighting a 2-year battle with a decision-maker-person who insists on using Helvetica for EVERYTHING.

Yea but if you give them 20 examples of good sites and throw in 1 crappy one they inevitably like the crappy one the best...

Can we know more about your problem? Educate them on good design... well you can give them a reading list of a good hundred books lol.

Conversation about common goals would be my suggested route. Focus on the goal/s and think about how your design idea might ( or might not ) achive it/them. Explain what you think the weakness of the current solution is - beyond ’it sucks’. Think about the con side of your idea/s too. Sometimes change for it’s own sake is expensive & does nothing. Change needs to be justified. And what Dan said.

as for the Helvetica problem...

Make a mockup of some project but make it really badly. Then duplicate the mockup but change the font to something like univers or Akzidenz Grotesk or whatever you want to use. (something closer to helvetica would be easier) *Also modify the new layout to make it the one they will choose!

Then you give it to the decision makers and ask which one they like better. (Or if they know less you can ask which type they like better.) They will probably assume you are talking about the layout difference (not even noticing you changed the type) and (hopefully) choose the one with the font you want to use!

Just get them to sign off on it so when you start using your font you will have their signature to fall back on ;)

thanks- see, we have an issue critique next week and i am presenting how the design has changed and where i would like it to go in the future- i work for IN THESE TIMES magazine (www.inthesetiems.com) and before I got on board, their design was terrible. I have redesigned basically everything since then, but sometimes I feel like we can go farther with some of the layout- stray from the branded magazine style with our features/culture pieces- and this last issue i fought tooth and nail for it- and I won that battle. its just hard telling someone, no, this will work, just because you haven’t been exposed to certain things doesn’t mean they are bad... yada yada. i just fear future design arguments- and want to have a really compelling argument next week during the critique. thanks for any ideas and suggestions!

Ahh then what ebin said. Make up a simple report explaining why you made all the decisions you made. And it would help to have examples of other magazines/ publications that do the same thing to show them that other people are doing it and it’s not a risk but the right thing to do.

Simple and to the point would probably be best, like if on one page you had their design on one side and yours on another and a simple explanation of why yours works better.

well the basis of my argument is “why-design for a reason”- which is some of the breakthoughs i have been pushing lately. if there is no justified reason for what is being done based on the content, then it shouldn’t be done. the troubles i have root from them not understanding the designed interpretation of their content. For instance, there was a story about funding the left ( what everyone knows but noone will say) in our last issue, so I chose the font Heathen (http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/canadatype/heathen/) and noone understood and thought it would be non-legible. I used larger similar swashes and swoops on the page as graphic elements that complemented the font- and they asked if i should put money signs in them. eventually, i won the argument.
I will definitely grab some other magazines that have similar styles and whatnot to the looks and feel i am trying to achieve, but its not easy, as they always refer to other lefty publications (which don’t have the greatest design either) oy.

How about:

“You hired me to be the Art Director of this publication. Can we all review my job description?”

haha- well a favorite of mine is there is a reason there is an F in my BA and not yours...

Example arguments are fine but then we run the risk of only allowing for derivative design work. It would be nice if we didn’t have to explain every tiny design decision we make.

You have to explain everything in terms of solving their communication issues, not aesthetic issues. “How things look” is giving open season on the “I like it/I don’t like it” mentality to the lay person. How things WORK is the logic that sells concepts.

ChrisL

Picking your battles is key. If they perceive you as difficult or a prima donna they will be resistant to your ideas whether they are good or not. You may have to concede on smaller points in order to make your larger points and preserve good relations. I always had to teach my design assistants this fact, which runs counter to the idea that you should never compromise your design aesthetic. Fact is, you work for them.

Another tip - put in something you know they’ll want to change so you can give them that right away. My old boss for example hated green (how do you hate a color???) so I’d put something green in there to let him feel like he was top dog.

Nothing is more frustrating than “I just don’t like it” or “it’s not there yet” but it can be hard to get non-designers to be more specific than that.

You can show them mags like Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly (altho in truth I haven’t looked at them recently..) which do wildly creative designs in the well but stick to their formulas for the front and backmatter. I don’t think it matters if they are in different genres.

I don’t play tricks on my department.