Designer: After initial research, I focused on the oratorio theme of St. Francis. Here, the composition of the title expresses the particular cross in the shape of a “T”, called the Tau Cross, used by St. Francis and his disciples. I photographed this statue at Saint Francis of Assisi Church in San Francisco, where I live.

Client response: It is a happy musical piece, therefore, this dark brown color scheme is too sad. The vertical – horizontal type does not allow easy readability in the street. The subject should not be too esoteric.

Young people entering the design profession sometime think that the ideas of seasoned professionals never get rejected, that the design is immediately embraced by the grateful client who insists on doubling your fee because it is so awesomely good. In your dreams!! Design is not called a “process” without reason. More often, there is give-and-take, client clarification and addition of new (and often pertinent) information, analysis and refinement, and sometimes your favorite design isn’t chosen.

In this case, we asked Swiss designer Jean-Benoit Levy, who works for clients worldwide and is a member of the prestigious Alliance Graphique Internationale, if he would share the behind-the-scene reasoning of a poster he designed for a concert performance of Le Laudi di San Francesco d’Assisi for Choeur Faller in Lausanne, Switzerland. Levy has been creating the graphics for this oratorio choir group for the past three years, in collaboration with its president Jacques-Henri Addor. For this concert, Levy presented his first sketches in December of 2008 and after 16 different versions, a final design was chosen in March 2009 for the May performance. We picked five of the concepts he presented and asked him to summarize both his and his client’s response to each.