How to choose the right clients according to top designers

For working designers, building an “ethical” design practice often comes down to choosing the right clients. The party line is obvious enough: Don’t work for cigarette companies or anyone you don’t agree with. Done! 

But design work has very real outcomes, and we had a hunch that there’s more nuance to the notion of ethics and clients than simply turning down a Joe Camel redesign. So we reached out to three forward-thinking studios to ask how they balance ethics and output: Lyon & Lyon, a U.K.-based agency known for its packaging work, and its desire to make packaging obsolete; Partner & Partners, a worker-owned design studio in Brooklyn focused on clients that promote social, economic, and environmental justice; and Delcan & Co., Pablo Delcan’s studio known for incisive political visualizations, as well as art and editorial work beyond.

Of course, ethics are a highly subjective—and highly personal—realm. What follows are opinions and distilled advice, but in them, you just might find elements that resonate as you navigate credos, capitalism, and cash flow. 

Lesson 1: Draw your line in the sand

At Lyon & Lyon, a single word can kill a project. Given the agency’s focus on sustainability, when disposable entered a brief for a new baby product, the agency pulled the plug. It’s critical to know your boundaries and when they are being crossed. Moreover, as cofounder Benny Lyon says, “Challenge the client [at the outset]. Ask them what their ethics are, what the ethics of the brand are. Just be bold at that point.” 

But also, listen carefully—because ethical buzzwords are everywhere in business, and many are now built into the PR and mission statements of companies. Lyon and his cofounder, Mat Lyon, explain that it can ultimately lead to greenwashing. For their part, they recommend stating your own ethical principles clearly—and aggressively. They admit that doing so has cost them work—but it’s work they likely didn’t want to begin with. 

Lesson 2: Who you do work with is as important as who you don’t

Partner & Partners has been around since 2013, and its list of clients speaks for itself in terms of the direction of the studio’s output and preference of clients to collaborate with—including Alliance for Youth Action, Housing Justice for All, Waging Nonviolence, and many other organizations focused on social justice issues.

“Luckily, I think we don’t often get approached by people that we don’t want to work with,” Partner Lulu Johnson says. “It’s pretty rare for us to get an email or look into someone and be like, ‘Oh, we don’t feel comfortable with this.’”

When it comes to portfolios, one solid bit of well-traded advice is to not feature everything you’ve ever done, but rather the work you want to do more of. The same goes for things like client lists on your website and social channels.

In short: When you can showcase your principles through your body of work, the right clients find you.

Lesson 3: Let clients challenge you

Given Pablo Delcan’s political covers for such outlets as The New York Times Magazine, one might assume (as this author did) that he agrees with all of it. In fact, Delcan says that’s not always the case. While he wouldn’t work on something that crosses a personal ethical line, he welcomes differing perspectives into his output.

“I believe that the counter arguments to my beliefs should exist out there, and should be addressed,” he says. “I’m not one to want to distance myself from points of view that I don’t agree with. If anything, I want to understand them better so that I can strengthen my own beliefs.”

Lesson 4: Taking on clients is iterative—so learn from it

Delcan used to work from a Manhattan studio, and he says it made it all that much harder to maintain a purely ethical compass. With colleagues to support and New York City rent to pay, “all of a sudden, if a project that I was not so interested in came by, it was like, ‘Okay—is this something that we can do and feel good about doing and not feel completely gross afterwards? There were a handful of those projects that did happen, and I’ll probably never show anyone, but they’re definitely part of my career in some form.”

Ultimately, Delcan says such projects inform the next ones. When you take on a project that doesn’t make you feel good, you’re wise to sit with that feeling and learn from it. For him, it has gone on to inform his publishing and editorial design—it might pay less, but he finds purpose and freedom in the work, which he creates from his relocated studio in the Catskills.

Lesson 5: Hack a project to make it more ethical

Given the aforementioned greenwashing, what’s a designer to do? When it comes to physical packaging and sustainability, unlike a lot of ethical quandaries, the Lyons say solutions are easy: Use as much responsibly sourced cardboard as possible in lieu of plastic. Consider refills. Utilize soy- or vegetable-based inks. Go for biodegradable materials. Work to shift the mindset of your client. (Mat Lyon recommends plasticfree.com as a resource of inspiration and substrate information.)

Sometimes, the Lyons will even ask: Do you really need to make this product at all?

“Inevitably, it’s more budget for design and more budget for the eco-materials,” says Mat Lyon, “so it’s really convincing the client that if they say they want to be sustainable, how much? Are we going all the way—or are we just ticking some boxes?”

Lesson 6: Accept that not everything is black and white

Greg Mihalko, a founder and co-owner of Partner & Partners, says no one exists in a vacuum. So if a potential client comes to the studio but doesn’t represent a co-op or the most radical organization, yet has a good budget and wants Partner & Partners to design a solution utilizing the studio’s outlook and politics, they would absolutely take the project into consideration. “We can’t starve; we have to support our families,” Mihalko says. “There are ways to approach this stuff without being as black and white and rigid because we live in a world of contradictions, and we have to acknowledge them.”

On the flipside, he notes that the model of studios doing large projects for smaller organizations at extremely low rates has faded. 

“Most of the people that approach us now understand what it means for us to be working on something—what our labor costs are valued at. It’s a little bit disrespectful, or was, to just throw that out the window and be like, ‘Can you do this brand for me for $500? We have no money, we’re an organization.’ You wouldn’t do that to the community that you’re representing and trying to organize, so why would you do it to the designers that need to make a living also?” 

Lesson 7: Don’t forget that ethics are indeed a two-way street

Partner & Partners strives for a four-day workweek. Co-owner Devika Sen says this gives her more opportunities to be in her community as well as go to a therapy appointment or take a dance class—and it collectively finds its way back into her work. 

“That all just informs me as a person and can only help my practice as a designer, I think, because if you’re just a designer who’s working on your project for 80 hours a week and you don’t get a break and you’re just looking at that all day, that’s not a fully formed view of the world at all.”

Ultimately, when it comes to ethics: Treating yourself as your own client is as critical as finding the right ones.