Clutch has published a new feature article by Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, titled “What 25 Years of Design Projects Taught Us About What Clients Actually Need.”
The piece draws on two and a half decades of client work across enterprise web design and development — spanning healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, nonprofits, and consumer brands — to examine one of the most consistent patterns in design consulting: the gap between what organizations ask for and what actually moves the work forward. Briefs reflect where a client is at a given moment. What experienced design leadership does is help them see farther forward than the immediate ask.
Lentz structures the piece around six recurring patterns she has observed across client engagements. When clients ask for visual improvements, what they usually need is clarity. The ability to explain themselves quickly and confidently to the right audience is the underlying ask from creative agency. When they ask for more features, what they often need is a reason to simplify, because complexity compounds quietly and an experience built for organizational completeness rarely serves the people navigating it. When they ask for a rebrand, the harder conversation is almost always about positioning: who the organization is actually for, and whether the brand still reflects that honestly.
The article also addresses the trust dimension of client-agency relationships, examining why process requests are often a proxy for something less tangible. Organizations that have been burned before aren’t primarily asking for better milestones. They’re asking for a relationship in which they feel confident and informed. Lentz argues that what builds that trust isn’t the process itself, but the quality of the questions asked at the start and the consistency between what’s promised and what’s delivered.
Two additional sections cover design systems and web accessibility. On systems, the piece makes a distinction that matters for any organization maintaining a component library at scale: the deliverable and the outcome aren’t the same thing. A design system that doesn’t account for how an organization actually operates will drift from the moment it’s published. On accessibility, Lentz pushes back on the compliance framing that dominates most briefs, arguing that accessibility as a design practice improves the experience for everyone and produces stronger work overall when treated as a discipline rather than a checklist.
The article closes with an observation that holds across all of it: the needs underlying client briefs tend to be more consistent than the briefs themselves. Organizations want to be understood, to communicate with confidence, and to trust that the people they’ve hired are paying attention. What changes is how those needs are expressed, and what the competitive context demands.
The piece is published on Clutch, the leading B2B ratings and reviews platform, where ArtVersion holds a 4.9 rating across 43 verified client reviews.
Erin Lentz is Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, where she leads experience design across brand identity, digital systems, and enterprise web work. She offers ongoing commentary on design strategy, usability, and the organizational dimensions of building experiences that hold up at scale. Her thought leadership appears regularly across industry and business publications. She was recently featured in Graphic Design USA on the structures behind scalable design.
Read the Full Article on Clutch →