[thelist] Re: Client Relations Re: 'design by..' line

Annie Phelan aphelan at norlink.net
Tue Jul 4 12:46:44 CDT 2000


Anyone who is interested enough in a website you designed to have you design
theirs is going to be more than willing to simply contact the company and find
out who designed their sight. Information like this is only a phone call or
mouse click away. I tend to agree with Liz, 'design by..' lines make a website
look amateur. Never mistake a corporate website for a piece of art, it is not,
it cannot be, and to view it as such can be extremely dammaging to the company
the site is being designed for. Art is impressionistic and biased to the
designer. That is the exact stand a corporation doesn't want to take. View the
website as the virtual store, and model it as such. You wont find the interior
designer's and marketing strategist's names painted up on the wall, that's
tacky, cheap marketing.


> >it seems to me somewhat like commissioning a piece of art work and =
> >asking the artist not to sign it.=20
>
> To me, it's like asking the designer not to sign a holiday brochure, like
> asking the director not to put credits at the end of a tv advert, or asking
> the copywriter not to put their name at the bottom of every slogan they
> write. In other words, it's expecting us to behave like professionals in a
> professional industry......

> .......(having said that, somewhere i used to work got a lot of business from
> a
> teeny credit on a couple of cdroms for a multinational...but BY GOD did we
> have to fight to get it! I think we were allowed to include ourselves as
> technical support for the disc or something...you might want to consider a
> similar approach?)





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