An insurance salesman I am working with calls me, livid about a ten-second music pad I have created for him. It features some pop drums and an upbeat Acappella melody.
Client: My clients aren’t black, don’t live in Harlem, and don’t want to hear hip hop!
A "did he just go there?!" moment from the Clients From Hell archives.
Me: Here are the photographs from the shoot yesterday
Client: Nice shots - I like this one from behind the man. Can you just flip the image so we can see his face and not the back of his head?
Me: You want me to turn him around in the photograph so you can see his face?
Client: Yes - and maybe we can make him black. Do you have Photoshop?
A "Photoshop can't do that, and you DEFINITELY can't ask that" moment from the Clients From Hell archives!
I had a silly project where I had to make a superhero, called Hyundai woman, for a dealership.
Client: Can you make her more Asian? Hyundai is Korean and we want to honor that, so can you make her have more slanted eyes?
A very difficult and picky client was looking for voiceover talent. She did not want to pay very much but wanted someone “who sounds like James Earl Jones.”
By some miracle, the talent company found someone who sounded almost exactly like the real James Earl Jones. I excitedly played the clip for the client. Her response? “Ewww. No. He sounds black.”
A "yikes" moment from the Clients From Hell archive.
I worked at a company that designed products and wrote books for the arts and crafts industry. One of my first assignments was to design a line of stickers that fit on bottle caps. I did a sheet of cartoonish faces, with several skin tones, to make the sheet inclusive.
While reviewing the product line, my boss made a face at the sticker faces sheet.
Me: Are they too silly?
Client: No, they just all need to be this color.
She pointed to the lightest skin tone.
Me: I was hoping to make this set inclusive, so all kinds of kids would see themselves reflected in them.
She wrinkled her nose, and said that our customers were mostly white, so our products should be white. Yikes.
I made the corrections, and started noticing that this happened a lot. Photos in our books? White people only. Hand shots? White hands only. Image collections? White faces only.
At the last trade show I did with the company, a long-time customer came up to me, and asked if we had any products that looked like her. She was an older black woman who walked with a cane, so I asked her to be more specific. She indicated her face, and I quietly said "Not at our company. Probably not ever at our company."
I quit shortly afterwards, started my own company, and one of the first things I produced was an image collection of black faces, named after that customer.
Me: We don’t have images to represent people from China.
Client: Just use an image with slanted eyes people, they all look the same.
I have a client who likes to keep his office atmosphere "fun." His big thing is "silly monkey" - he uses this as an adjective to describe everything as if he's the host of a kid's TV show. "Silly monkey coffee," "silly monkey meeting," you get the picture. His employees tolerate it because while he is embarrassing, he's not the worst.
I happened to stop by the office one day when he was having a meeting with someone - I'm not sure what about - but what I remember CLEARLY was when he asked one of the people he was meeting with if she was a "silly monkey woman."
She was black, and the look she gave him still gives me spasms of shame and anxiety years later.
I don't think he noticed.
Client: God, you people are always so persnickety.
He meant designer, but I'm also Jewish and it took me a moment to second guess if he was telling me a stereotype I haven't been told time and time again.
I'm a makeup designer for a local live theatre, I have my services advertised on the internet. A supervisor from some branch business calls us.
Client: Would you do complicated makeup for non-actors? Say, applying full body makeup on office workers?
Me: I suppose you could do that. What kind of makeup would you need to be applied on office workers?
Client: Well we have a problem. Our executive-level manager will be visiting our branch later this month and all our employees are White. It wouldn't look good if there were no employee diversity at our location. If we hired you could you work your magic on a few of our employees to make them look Black, or Chinese, or some other minority race?
I was developing a storyboard with several named characters, representing diverse ages and ethnicities.
Client: We like diversity, but the old people are ugly. Can you replace them with younger people?
Me: OK, here you go.
Client: We like diversity, so no gender-specific pronouns in the descriptions of the characters.
Me: OK, here you go.
Client: We like diversity, but can you change the character's names so that they are all NORMAL? For example, the Asian guy should be named, say, Tom Smith.
Me: ...