Account Handlers

Many design groups use account handlers. Some account handlers do a good job, but in most cases account handling leads to clients being divorced from the creative process and imagining that design is an invisible procedure. When this happens, problems ensue.

Forcing clients to deal with account handlers downgrades the creative process and turns it into a mess of indecision and rejection. There's nothing easier for a client than rejecting or brainlessly modifying work when someone with no personal stake in the project is charged with presenting it. It's much harder to tell a designer, or someone intimately involved with the creative production of a piece of work, that their efforts are rejected. Of course, this is why clients prefer to deal with account handlers; they can be bullied.

Furthermore, account handlers in agencies and big design groups often develop a greater loyalty to their clients than to their own creative teams. This is hardly surprising. They are encouraged to bond with their clients - thats their job. But clients sense this, and they rip creative work to pieces.

In the modern design studio everyone does the 'account handling', and every phone call, email, or meeting is an opportunity to 'look after clients'. For solo designers, the same applies. They spend half their time being a designer and the other half being an account handler - not to mention accountant, debt chaser, production controller, spellchecker, light-bulb changer and a dozen other roles. To put it as bluntly as possible - all designers have to learn to become account handlers all the time.

Graphic Design: A User's Manual by Adrian Shaughnessy