Design clients -- particularly graphic design clients -- are often blamed for design’s spec creative / design pitch problems.

The reality, though, is that most free client pitches are a result of the bewildering lack of strategic marketing in design sectors worldwide.

Design clients have specific problems, yet 90% of design practitioners market themselves on their generic design prowess.

Everything is vanilla, and so design clients like to taste before buying. This is the root cause of speculative creative work and design pitching.

This problem, and how designers can avoid it, was the subject of Why Design Stopped Being Special, an event hosted by Zyzzyva MD Sean Ashcroft at London’s V&A Museum, as part of the 2011 London Design Festival.

This event is now available as an interactive audio PDF presentation, which you can download by clicking the image below.

the last word in helping designers escape free pitching

Design clients, spec work and you: a PDF download

Subscribe above to Zyzzyva’s exclusive library of free content, created to help designers become more profitable. Quarterly ebooks will include:

Design clients: Retention and referral

Networking for designers

Niche marketing for designers

Discoverable case studies

Expertise marketing for designers

Freelancing for designers

Social media for designers

Selling design

NOTE: This file is called design-clients.pdf and will download automatically to your desktop. To interact with it, you will need recent versions of Acrobat Reader and Flash Player.