Should you tell prospects why they shouldn’t hire you?

Jessica Hische, a tremendous print designer and illustrator has a section on her website titled “Why you should not hire me to design your website.“  Some excerpts:

I might seem like a jack of all trades because I do print design, type design, lettering, and illustration, but really I’m a specialist. I specialize in drawing type and illustration. This is what I’m best at and is probably why you found my website in the first place. I find it strange that I get so many requests for web design—I went to school for graphic design, yes, but each subfield of graphic design has its own set of problems, limitations, and guidelines.

Just as you wouldn’t expect any random person that owns Adobe illustrator to be able to draw a decorative initial from scratch, you can’t expect any print designer to be able to really and truly design for web. Web design is not print design, it is so much more complex. With book design, a person that encounters your book knows how to view it. They look at the cover, they open the cover, and page by page they work their way to the end. With web design, it’s (for the most part) not linear. You have to understand how people are going to use the site (and how people use the web changes all the time).

Anyway, to conclude a fairly long rant: Hire people that are best at what they do. It’s not that I (or other print designers) CAN’T do web design, its that you should want to hire someone that will do it best—someone that knows the ins and outs of the web and can then hire people like me to do what they do best: draw ornaments, logos, illustrations etc that will make the site sing.

I’m quite certain many lawyers and firms would benefit from a similar “disclaimer” telling potential clients why not to hire them.  Communicating what you do — and most importantly, what you don’t (and won’t) do — goes a long way towards getting you the clients you want and dissuading the ones you don’t from picking up the phone.