I agree with you completely, Chris. I might contract with a designer and say “do as you will, here’s all my money”- in which case, if I come back later I’m stuck with what they did. Now, in my opinion, if I choose at that point to knock everything down and start over, that’s my perogative- the designer really shouldn’t say a word, although I suppose they could choose to never work with me again.

But to be honest, I’d never contract with a designer this way. And any designer that expected this kind of (what I perceive as) stupidity on my part wouldn’t be invited to work for me. The best relations I had with designers have started with that person learning a ton about me and what I want. They don’t start by telling me what I *should* want. If I have an idea, they’ll try to integrate it- I’ll listen to them, and disagree only when I have a really strong personal feeling about something. What gets designed is something that actualizes some vision I had refined and filtered by the talent of the designer.

Like you say, if an artist/designer wants to fund their own creation, they have free will to follow their vision in its entirety. What they create is theirs to keep or sell. Alternately, they must tether and compromise their vision to the will of the person paying for the creation. I imagine that’s why there are so many starving artists 🙂