February 2010
Top 20 CFH Posts [Be Creative Magazine] →
On 17 Dec, a manager from accounting department asked me to design a birthday card for her friend.
Her: “I want you to put Snowman, or Santa Claus and another Christmas ornaments on it.”
Me: “It would look like a christmas card then, not a birthday card.”
Her: “But Christmas is Jesus’ birthday.”
Client: “The other day I saw on this website that whenever a mouse pointer moved a word followed it. And they would spin and blast out and come back.”
Me: “Yeah…those were popular in the late 90’s.”
Client: “Can you do that with our mission statement?”
Me: “You mean, like the full paragraph blasting around the site whenever the browser would...
January 2010
We Don't Own That
Me: “You’ll want to redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com to avoid duplicate content errors.”
Client: “Oh, we don’t own www.domain.com. We only own domain.com.”
“Hi could you please fix my website so that people in Canada can’t see it? It...”
“Can you take this photo of me and my baby and rotate the baby so you can see...”
“We’re looking for a high-exposure designer for our site. We want some flash stuff, maybe even some other interactive features.
I can only afford a one-time $25 payment upon completion/upload of the site, however it’s a great way to add a fun, popular business to your portfolio.”
Client: “That font right there! It’s clean yet edgy. There’s no WAY I’ve seen that font before, I would’ve remembered! What font is that?”
Me: “Arial.”
“We have no budget for this ad, but the good news is that we are definitely sure...”
Future Client From Hell
From Craigslist:
I need the blackest of black really shiny glossy 1400X 1200 background for my web page. Other jobs to follow.
Compensation: $10
“Those hands look like lesbian hands.”
[After a video shoot]
“Can’t you just lower the resolution to Standard Def so I don’t have to pay the Hi Def price on the video?”
“I showed this to my eight year old daughter and she didn’t like the colors.”
“The client wants you to add a circle TM after their tag line.”
Client: “Can we put a ‘Z’ at the end of the name?”
Me: ”Why?
Client: “To help with search rankings!”
“The phrase ‘the sky’s the limit’. It sounds a little limiting....”
A client once gave me some text which included a spelling error. Instead of saying “you spelled that wrong” I tried to be tactful about it. I said I wasn’t sure about the spelling so I looked it up in the dictionary and discovered that it was spelled differently. Then the client insisted that there was a typo in the dictionary and we had to go to press with the spelling mistake.
This was for a series of employee training modules at a nuclear power plant:
“That chart about the different kinds of radiation makes the radiation seem too scary. Can you make it look friendlier?”
Client: “I took a Marketing Course so I’d like to submit some of my own ideas. The business cards have far too much wasted space so I want a calender on the back, people will love that and use it all the time. The newspaper ad is fine but I’d like you to get them to print it upside down, that way people will instinctively want to rotate the newspaper to read it. Pretty good...
“I thought your quote was for an unlimited time limit, I’m not finished with my changes and I don’t want to pay any extra!”
“Can you call Google and ask them when the website will show up in the search...”
“I want my whole identity package to be done in all caps because that’s the way I...”
“Your design looks like the teletubbies website.”
“Here is some hair I cut off of my poodle. Make my fabric match my poodle.”
“I dont care if it loses 90% of visitors, we cant have a skip on the website...”
“I need to get moving, anyway you can do some work on this on your vacation. ...”
“I got together 6 of my trusted friends, we each had a bottle of wine and printed...”
How much do you charge for a website?
Me: “Well it depends.”
Client: “Well then can you give us a ballpark figure?”
Me: “Professional or Minor League?”
“Can we pay for the logo in installments, or even better can I pay you in Salad.”
“Oh, the product will sell. God wants it to.”
After having delivered an eCommerce site to a client, he called me on the phone, explaining that he had experienced some problems ordering products. While on the phone, I explained to him that I would do a test order to see if I could reconstruct the problem he experienced. The ordering went fine, but suddenly he says
Client: “Wow, I got an order from you here. You want that Jacuzzi?...
Client: “I have a great idea, and I’d like to bring you on board as a partner.”
Me: “Go on..”
Client: “It’s great. I want to recreate Google, but make it better.”
Me: “How?”
Client: “Well that’s where your expertise comes in.”
Client: “I want a website that can make me a lot of money. Can you do that?”
Me: “Sure, what do you have in mind”
Client: “… one that can make me a lot of money…?”
“Needs more WA-WA-WOOM.”
“Oh, I haven’t been in touch because I have been on vacation for the past week…...”
“Most of our photos are all white people, but we need to show more diversity, and...”
“Here, I really like Apple’s logo, so I’ve taken their logo and put our name...”
“I can’t afford to pay you the balance, but would you like my Jack Russell...”
“I want a solid background. Something that fades from light to dark or dark to...”
The Brief: A series of 12 covers for children’s puzzle books. To use bright primary colours.
Client: “You seem to have used some colours more than once”.
Me: “Yes, there are only so many colours”
The client: “Well you’re the designer. Can’t you come up with some new ones”.
“Your hourly rate is okay, as long as you don’t need more than an hour. And you...”
“Please use different type faces, especially when there is more than one article...”
“I don’t want to use a sandcastle. Everyone knows dogs pee on sandcastles at the...”
“Hi. Yeah. We had our site built in India. Right. It is not working now. We are...”
“Oh, actually we already paid a company to design it in Photoshop. We just need...”
“Make sure it’s not too edgy, not too flashy, not too much detail, not...”
“Please remove commas and periods thanks”
“I need 365 all-new, original ‘Far-Side’-esque cartoons for a daily calendar. I...”
“That looks really nice, we love it…could you also ditch the graphics and just...”
