Revisions- Proposal and Contractual Clauses

Amanda, i have been working for myself for over 35 years and i have probably learned most things the hard way. i read your story a few times trying to understand what you are saying rather than what you are asking. Seth and Andrew have given you some practical advice, i can give you practical advice but i think it might be more beneficial to give you some philosophical advice. i specialize in residential projects and i charge hourly, it doesn’t matter if the project is a small back yard or a cliff side house w/ a budget that takes your breath away. if it can have some design significance in the way it solves site problems or deals w/ culture or the environment i want to do it.

I’ve recently started a blog which i hope will be helpful to young designers, i want to talk about design process, lessons learned and epiphanies based on my experience and observations. i think your issues are universal for a starting designer, you will find that many people will take advantage of you especially developers if given the chance. i will try to expand my response in to a blog post when i havemore time.

i don’t understand your employment situation, you say that you are working for yourself providing design services but you are an hourly employee.  could you clarify this more because it makes a world of difference in the hat that you wear, your legal responsibilities and your loyalties. do you get to make design decisions and what is your basis for the decisions, budget, plants-on-hand or site problems?

when i think of you ‘working on your own’ i see several red flags in your story that you need to consider.

1. time is somebody’s money, you need to be aware of the implications of your time if you are working for someone else, they probably have another agenda than you. i try to get my staff to understand an urgency to come up w/ usable efforts.

2. clients don’t want to waste money on replacing ‘premium’ plants (exotic) that can freeze. Yikes, i don’t believe that you wrote that. you will find that most clients have worked hard for their money and they are making an improvement in their property and lifestyle. they usually don’t have money to throw away and they are actually looking to you to not have such things happen.

3. clients vision doesn’t match your vision, yikes again, I’m an old school modernist and i believe design is an act of solving problems and the beauty of the design follows the elegance of the solution. if you don’t have an understanding of the problems you can’t very well solve them, the clients program requirements, wishes and vision are the major part of the design process. it quite possible that the client’s vision is misguided because of site restraints or ill fitting preconceptions.

i have had clients give me magazine clippings and tell me they want that, it usually something that i hate, so i will ask them what about the photo do they like, the textures, the color, the pillows? i try to steer them away from preconceptions to looking at their site problems. the client can tell you what they want, it’s your job to tell them what they need. to do this you need to analyze the site to get an understanding of it limitations and opportunities. i consider myself a site-opportunist who is out to exploit the benefits of the site. the first thing i do when i go to a new project is ask myself what do the neighbors have that we can use.

when i first started in the field it was obvious to me that landscape design was arbitrary and divorced from the reality of the site. my first job was with a design-build contractor and i saw that landscaping was a situation where someone could spend an enormous amount of money and when they were done they could still have all the site prioblems they started with, it was eyewash where the client gets fleeced. my point is that your design needs to be beneficial to the client on several levels. A happy client is your best agent for referrals. you need clients to try out ideas on and to build your portfolio and your reputation. i have found that every project brings in another project.

4. designers should fix things they missed for no charge, not necessarily, unless it is an error, is there a situation that has affected you in your job?

i would venture that at your age you don’t really know what ‘crazy revisions’ are and how ‘comprehensive landscape design service’ can be. i typically revise my designs until i am convinced that i can’t make them any better, then they are ready to show the client, that’s what the design phase is to me, but this only happens after the client and i are on the same page and have mutual goals. i approach the design as a linear process where the client is involved, what is really good is if you can plant an idea that the client thinks is theirs.the easy part of a design is to solve the clients program needs the hard part is to make it art and i think that’s worth striving for if you plan to be a designer.

you should approach every project as if it will be your best design yet no matter what the budget is. if you want to be successful in this field you need a variety of tools and technical skills and design skills should be at the top. you can learn from every experience and entry level jobs at design-build firms can give you valuable experience even if you aren’t treated well. and you need to be sincere. 20 years ago i had a landscape architect working for me and i was looking at his design for a project and i said that i thought the design was pretty ordinary and that he was capable of doing better. he said he was but it was ‘good enough’ for that client, i fired him on the spot. just good enough should never be a consideration. this was really rambling and you may think I’m nuts. when it comes to billing for your time i think you need to evaluate the time you are billing to the client and ask yourself if the exact time spent had the value you are billing for. i learned that from my lawyer he would add up his hours and then bill for less time if he thought it was fair. i don’t bill all the time when i am learning something new or doing 3-D renderings because the renderings can be used in a portfolio and aren’t really necessary to sell the design. your time is cheap, you have lots of it, i think it more important to build your portfolio and gain experience than worrying about revisions, i hope this is of some help