"it's people!"

Via the folks at Signal vs Noise, this great post by Paula Scher about brand design and identity seems enormously relevant to anyone in them there creative industries:

Another thing they don’t teach you in design school is what you get paid for... Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace... The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design.

Change the word "designer" to art director, writer, creative director or information architect and that paragraph still reflects a real truth.

People will approve whatever you do. People will criticize whatever you do. People will build whatever you do. With people having such an important role in what you do, having some ability to persuade them to do things will be more than a little handy.

I worked with one art director who was brilliant, whose work was uncompromising. Clients loved it and him in the first presentation. But then things tended to happen: other points of view, unanticipated factors, simple ignorance, Whenever there was a bump like this in the process, he couldn't deal with it. He was invariably right about who was wrong and what should be done to solve it. But in his passion and zeal he couldn't make anyone else see his point of view, or worse, do anything about it. They thought he was a whiner, an asshole, or worse. In the past he'd been advised before to tone down his passion, or some such crap, which of course was impossible. His passion defined him, made his work what it was. The only advice I could think of for him was to stop being right – to stop simply asserting what he believed – and to start thinking about how to get other people to do what he wanted. I don't know if it changed him in any kind of deep, dark, fundamental way, but working with him got a little easier, and his work didn't suffer.

Clients quickly get leery of creatives who fall back on craft explanations for things, or who get defensive, or who clam up when things don't go their way. 

I guess thinking like this is political, and smacks of compromise and serial failure. But it's also respectful of everyone else you work with, and of yourself and your work. Because in order to sell your work through round after round of changes, you need to keep being at the table. You can only persuade people that what you want to do is what they want to do, if you're actually there talking to them.