Self-Client Syndrome
07 June 2006
To build distilldesign.com, I took on myself as a client. Six months later, after many long meetings with my impossible-to-please, headstrong client, I finally arrived at an acceptable solution for his web presence. It was challenging. He put my through my paces, certainly. There was always one more tweak. I soon found myself under an avalanche of his tweak requests. But enough is enough.
The trouble is knowing when to say so. When you're your own customer, you have 24/7 realtime access to all his thoughts. Occasionally, during the course of designing distilldesign.com, I would wake up in the middle of the night with yet another tweak, scrambling to find a piece of paper to write it on. A good client never calls at 2am. I guess I was a bit overzealous with my designer.
The challange is finding the balance between: it works, it's beautiful, and it could be better. It could always be better. But it will never be perfect. Hopefully, though, it will always be beautiful, and it will always work.