Whatever the discipline, all designers will have encountered clients whose initial brief becomes an unfolding revelation. The same behaviour can arise whatever you're designing: advertising, software, hair, music (well, isn't a record producer basically a sound designer?). In my experience the initial brief is usually adequate, and it's not that the client then has a change of heart so much as keeps finessing the original requirements, adding new features and focusing on aesthetic details which aren't critical to the success of the project.

I've long thought that there are two possible reasons for this behaviour.

One possible reason is a fear of success. Subconsciously the client doesn't want the project to be completed, and the never-ending stream of additions ensures nothing can ever be signed off and delivered. Thankfully I've not had to work with clients in this category for a couple of years, and I'm grateful for that. It usually ends badly, and it's inevitably portrayed as the designer's fault.

The other possible reason is that the client really wants to be the designer. I understand this: I've never been comfortable handing over control of something that's critically important to me. The result can be a stream of supplementary requirements: can we add this? could we ensure it does that? can we use these colours? And for all but the most outrageous requests the answer usually has to be "Yes; you're the client".

Whatever the reason for this behaviour, the result is the same. The design train gets bogged axle-deep in the mud of additional requirements. If the client revises the initial brief to include them it's often necessary to start the design process again each time. If the client doesn't revise the initial brief, every step of the design process requires multiple cross checks against the supplementary emails, documents and notes of telephone conversations. Progress is slow and difficult ... and, of course, the new ideas don't stop arriving.

I've always been aware I would be a very poor client in this respect. And now I have proof.

I'm in the process of redeveloping my own website. This is a labour of love that gets barely more than a lick and a promise on the occasional evening when I'm not too weary to contemplate it. It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up because, when it was first developed some years ago, I knew very little about web technologies and any other developer looking behind the scenes (and we all do) would write me off as an amateur. However, I find I keep coming up with good ideas I want to include in the revision, and these have resulted in repeated reworking and little forward progress for some time. I also get bound up with how the site looks, ahead of focusing on getting the functional building blocks in place. It's taken me some weeks and input from one of my own clients (thanks Bob) to recognise that my revised website is a victim of the same behaviour.

So how can we avoid being a victim to this behaviour? How do we avoid projects being designed to death?

I think the principle is a simple one: Good ideas keep coming, great ideas keep. In fact, not only do great ideas keep, they get better for being left to mature before they're implemented. In practical terms then:

• The formal process of accepting and signing off a brief is a good one: it makes it clear that the brief contains the requirements we'll be working on, and contains the only requirements we'll be working on until we produce the first draft.
• A combination of expedient deafness and rapid delivery can be used to ensure the design draft is turned around before having to acknowledge any new ideas. If it's going to take six hours to complete the first draft, don't check email, and let the phone go to voice mail until the job's done. The world won't end before the work does.
• I'll be suggesting to clients the approach I've now adopted for my own website revision. Good ideas and aesthetic concerns get quickly documented and then ignored while I power on with the functional implementation. The key is having a single, simple method for capturing those new ideas. Thankfully there are many options: after checking out Evernote, Tomboy and Note Everything, I've opted for the now-discontinued Google Notebook.

In my experience good design benefits greatly from multiple iterations and feedback from clients and users. This has been true whether I've been mixing down a band's EP in the studio, writing an advertising script or developing software. But for multiple iterations to be useful, each iteration has to be completed before it's reviewed. Make sure that happens. Don't let your project be designed to death.

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