This week in the Student Lounge, Sepi Monahemi joins Trish to share her 10 years of design experience. Particularly, in this conversation, about how interior designers should work with their clients as people. They talk about how designers can protect themselves legally, how they need to show clients that they care and how to get inspired to design.

Tips

-Contracts can be serious and binding without being scary. Framing them as friendly agreements can do the job without getting too uncomfortable. And designers don’t need to be experts in contract law. All they need to know is what their kind of contract contains, so early contracts should be written in consultation with a lawyer or a mentor in the industry who do know what the agreement needs to specify.

-Part of a designers job is to foster trust with their clients. A great way to do that is to offer extra time or extra effort to a project to show that they value the outcome of the project beyond just that the check clears.

-If a designer needs inspiration for a project, Monahemi suggests browsing Instagram for ideas, not just interior design either. Inspiration for interiors can come from any picture that strikes a designer. They can also spend quality time with pieces of furniture in showrooms to extrapolate whole rooms from just one of those pieces.
Anybody who wants to get inspired by Sepi Monahemi’s designs should check out her Instagram @Sepi_Inspirational_Design.