All projects, design or otherwise have stakeholders. Project leaders and managers know how important it is to identify stakeholders and communicate regularly with them. The arts have had patrons for years. The same concept is useful for design projects. The New Oxford American Dictionary (oxymoron?) defines patron as:

A person who gives financial or other support to a person, organization, cause, or activity : Charles became a patron of Rubens and van Dyck | a celebrated patron of the arts.

A patron for a design project is someone who can decide whether or not to fund the design project (or future design projects). In a  company, it could be a director, a VP, or even the CEO.  Making sure that this person (its rarely more than one) absolutely loves the design will help ensure the continuing well being of the design project.

The first time this concept crystallized for me was when we had a team working on Sun’s Portal Server. The lead designer on the project had a list of some 10 things to work on, way more than we had resources. I said, lets ask the director of engineering what he wants. At the time we had not figured out the idea of patrons, but the director was the patron because he decided which projects his engineers did. We showed him a list that was ordered according to what we thought was important.

He surprised us. He looked over the list and picked something way down the list, the “Sample Portal”. We asked why. He said that he had a wonderfully powerful product, but no way of showing what it did. He needed the Sample Portal to show off his product.

We put together a team of the UX lead and a great visual designer. He had one of his engineering managers work closely with us. Together they came up with three concepts for the sample portal, all of which were great. The director gave them feedback, and they consolidated the feedback into one design, and after another round of feedback, they were done with the design. He liked it so much that he pounded his fist on the table an said to his engineering manager: “Build that.” Which they did. For years everybody talked about how happy they were with the project and the results.

This was the start of the “patron” concept for me. From then on, for any high profile project, we made an conscious effort to identify a patron, who, by putting his or her support behind a project could pretty much ensure it success. Its worked out very well indeed.