I worked on a logo for over a month with an out-of-state client. After I provided many different logo options and proofs for them, they still had no idea what they wanted.

Client: Yeah these are good I guess, but I think maybe something that represents our brand more, and what we do less.

Me: I’m not entirely sure what you mean. I’ve given you more than enough ideas to work with, each designed to your requests for them at the time. Can you give me some other specific examples of what you would like your logo to look like?

Client: We just don’t really know. We were hoping you could be creative and go crazy and see what you can come up with that makes our brand look sexy!

Me: (Staring at the email chain) I have given you some of my original ideas already, and without any clear direction on where I should take it, I’m at a loss for what to do for you at this point.

Client: We like #2, but can you add some “shimmer” to it?

They sent me metallic gradient examples of what they wanted it to look like.

Me: I can do the gradients, but a metallic texture that is that detailed would be difficult to reproduce as a vector image. There is lots of complex shading and lines that may not turn out correctly if I try to convert this to a vector image. And it may end up looking cluttered and unattractive; remember, when we started you said you wanted this logo to look “clean.” 

Client: Yeah we like the gradients, but can you make it shimmer like the colors that are on it? We like the look of the colors and how they fade into each other, but if you can’t do that then we can just do a gradient.

Me: …