Your immaculate mood boards, hand-selected swatches, and grand design concept may work with most clients. But what if they don’t? What if you run into someone who is not a visual person? Creatives often have vivid imaginations, able to see spatial potential, lighting, and proportion. But clients can be anyone, and someone with an engineering, management, or finance background is not necessarily guaranteed to have the sort of artist thought process often required to truly see a room’s potential. To work with non-visual clients, you must learn to sell the invisible and translate your creative concepts into data, logic, and structure.
Understand the Non-Visual Mindset
Non-visual thinkers can struggle to imagine individual swatch samples and 2D floor plans into a cohesive 3D environment. Even for visual people, it can be difficult to fully understand how a space will function without being physically present in it. If you detect fear or hesitation, it might not be due to the design itself. Rather, it may stem from a fear of committing significant time and money into something that they can’t personally verify will work.
While they don’t always go hand-in-hand, a non-visual thinker may also tend to think of things in a more utilitarian sense ― in other words, form is less important than function. So rather than using words like “cozy”, “elevated”, or “statement piece”, use more functional and value-based terms such as “durable”, “ergonomic”, or “practical”. While the fabric pattern and wood tone on that chair may match perfectly with the rest of the room, a non-visual client may be more swayed by how easily the fabric cleans, how solid the materials are, and how its placement allows them to get more out of the room.
Hybrid Design Presentations
Just because someone is a non-visual thinker does not mean aesthetics are useless. Rather than eliminating visuals from your presentations to them, you should simply augment any visuals with relevant data. Rather than mood boards and floor plans, go 3D. Photorealistic 3D renders are a great starting point, since they show exactly what the room would look like with your designs implemented. There is no need for imagination, because it’s all right there in front of them. The next step up would be a fully 3D walkthrough of the space, which additionally allows for a sense of how someone would interact with the rooms.
Where appropriate, consider presenting images of pieces with data such as: the portion of the budget dedicated to this piece, the dimensions of the piece, and other relevant information such as material safety certifications.
When you’re in the early stages and are still convincing a client to work with you, the easiest thing to do is to use before-and-after examples. Preferably with photography taken from the same angle for better direct comparisons, show clients how you transformed a space. Be sure to point out specific choices and why you made them, focusing on the impact they made on everyday usage. Rather than just sharing the beauty of the space, share how your design solved problems for your previous clients.
Communication Frameworks for Successful Non-Visual Presentations
Lead with logic, and follow with beauty. Explain the rationale behind the architectural choices, the flow of the space, and how efficiently you can utilize the budget before introducing things like color palettes, fabrics, and finishes.
In another article, we discussed how easy it is to overwhelm clients. This is great advice to keep in mind for non-visual clients. Prevent decision paralysis by presenting two or three curated options at one time rather than a whole spread. Clearly state the functional pros and cons, the price categories, and what makes them different from each other. Be ready to field questions and defend your choices.
If you’re also dealing with a risk-averse client, put risk mitigation at the top. Explain why certain materials were chosen, beyond just aesthetic reasons. For example, choosing long-lasting materials for high-traffic areas or incorporating a long lead time for procurement to get ahead of any delays.
Process Transparency
Since non-visual clients operate on trust, getting them to trust you and your design prowess is essential. If they can’t fully visualize a space, they need to know that you know what you’re doing. To this end, be transparent and communicative in your process. Show the step-by-step timeline and what can be expected before the actual in-house work begins. Send updates at certain milestones and communicate upfront what these communications will represent. Also be upfront about how scope changes, price adjustments, and other unexpected changes will be handled. You don’t have to say it all out loud, but be sure to provide them with an onboarding guidebook that contains any relevant information that they can reference. It may also help to establish review periods with specific timelines, which will force wishy-washy clients to sign off on decisions within a reasonable period.
Anxiety is common in interior design clients, as you’ll be entering their home, ripping it apart, and reassembling it ― hopefully more beautiful than ever. That anxiety is only deeper in non-visual thinkers, since they will struggle to envision themselves in their dream space. You don’t want to water down your own creativity to appeal to these clients, but by demonstrating executive-level business intelligence alongside your beautiful aesthetics, you can please everyone. Meshing with this kind of client can mean more efficient meetings, fewer revisions, fewer late-night texts, and faster sign-offs. So even if it takes some getting used to, you may learn to love non-visual clients.
Have you worked with any non-visual clients, perhaps without realizing it? Analyze those clients and think about how you could have handled things differently. Then stay attuned to the warning signs in future clients, and steer them toward your gorgeous vision that you know they’ll love.