[noduerme]

Just as a side note, I worked for several ad agencies with art directors who did the same thing. We'd make the final ad, then screw it up intentionally and show it to the client so they'd spot the obvious flaws/mistakes, tell us to fix them, and then we'd give them what we'd already done.

It's not a strategy I use in my own work now, but it taught me something interesting about the psychology of clients. I think there are better ways to let them know they got their money's worth, like writing full explanations of your choices and thought processes. But intentionally sabotaging your first draft is definitely a well-worn method in the art and design world.

[hinkley]

I got a general contractor talking shop once and he confessed to me that they overwhelm the customers with cosmetic choices on purpose. People need to put a certain amount of energy into a process to feel they have done their due diligence, and it often doesn't really matter how that energy is spent, just that it is.

In his case it was to distract the customer from worrying about things they can't control, like physics and building codes. The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance. Trying to fight that can snowball an entire project.

Easy decisions that you ultimately question leave a sliver of doubt and regret in your mind. I could have done more. I should have said something. Things you work your ass of on and still don't succeed, you can say you did your best.

[teddyh]

This is exactly the “Important Corollary Four” from Joel Spolsky’s old blog post The Iceberg Secret, Revealed from 2002: <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...>

[okeuro49]

> The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance

Why not just tell the customer that instead. I'd rather pay for someone to tell it to me straight, than someone who wants to purposefully overload the customer with trivial decisions.

[hinkley]

Because you don’t get paid for arguing with customers. Neither the physical time nor the stress.

If you don’t deal with it all day you may have no idea/empathy for the sorts of coping mechanisms people develop to reduce trauma. People can be the worst. They pay you for copper and expect gold.

Also as I stated above, until the customer has invested a certain amount of energy into the process, they will second guess themselves and you. Reviews are often tainted by how the customer feels about themselves. Ultimately the same problem the Duck is solving. They need to pee on it to mark it as theirs.

[spanktheuser]

Every ad / design agency I’ve worked for engages in this practice. Futhermore, in the large corporate rebranding exercises I’ve witnessed approximately 75% of the engagement consists of make-work designed to justify the price.

From a purely psychological perspective I find it fascinating. If you want to get a handle on how it looks IDEO is a company that publishes and speaks on ”process” quite prolifically. Keyword: “Design Thinking.”

[stakhanov]

This is pretty chilling to hear.

One of my big quarrels in my professional life is how clients/bosses want exposure to creative process but can't really handle it, if it's anything but linear, which, in actual reality, it never is.

Going through the creative process without exposing the bossman to it and then playing "creative process theater" for them is a solution to the problem, because the theater caters to their unrealistic expectations, not to reality.

But, the more tightly controlling they are, and the shorter the reporting interval, the more difficult it becomes to execute on this charade. This is particularly poignant, because the point applies not just to ad agencies and design work, but also other types of creative endeavor like software engineering. I really pity the wretched souls having to do daily standups, who end up getting caught in the crossfire there.

In particular: Bosses have unrealistic expectations of what creative process looks like. Those unrealistic expectations get reinforced because so much of the creative process they witness is "creative process theater". And then the poor soul who finds themselves in a situation where they have no other choice but to expose their boss to real creative process obviously can't deliver on their boss's expectations.

[browningstreet]

Most bosses have never gone through the creative processes that are being discussed here. Or if the boss did it for bread they won’t know how to apply the process to cars. A corporate rebranding is done many times by an agency but once or twice, ever, by the individuals on the client personnel. The boss who knows how it’s actually done will get less theater than the uncertain or over-eager boss who’s doing their first agency rebrand. And, sometimes, the marketing exec is party to the theater because they know a straight up offer to their upline won’t get accepted.

Put another way: I’ve done rebrands for agencies themselves. They’re still prone to the errors even though they know how the sausage is made. It’s an innate human tendency.

And btw — nothing is pretty. Branding, marketing, coding, project management, budgeting. It doesn’t have to be bullshit, but process is not often going to be pretty.

[noduerme]

Funny to hear you validate this. What's even funnier is catching my own junior designers trying to do it to me, and totally calling them on it.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

This is a bit like the age-old tale about the contractor that adds waits at the end of each function in his codebase, then when the client complains about performance in one area, he just removes the wait, then bills them more money for "optimizations."

[iamtedd]

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

[pmontra]

I remember reading here on HN of some web or ad agency intentionally adding a duck to a page before a demo to the customer. The customer eventually said, it's all OK but please remove the duck. They directed the customer's need to fix something to an obvious target. The customer is happy to have made a difference, the agency is happy not to have to do some extra work on something expensive to fix.

[_kb]

One origin of that approach is from Battle Chess - aka a duck feature: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/.