Over at the endlessly entertaining Clients from Hell, graphic designers and other creative professionals recount some of their most memorable experiences with the people who pay (or sometimes refuse to pay) the bills. Several of the entries provide evidence of the full-fledged moral panics that are frequently chronicled on this here blog. F'rinstance:
Backstory: Illustrating an educational book on hygiene for an NGO in a developing country. Client: "We don't want that illustration of a father bathing his child. It implies incest."
Another designer writes:
We were building a website for a client that has a preschool and sells curricula. Just before we went live, they called up and asked us to remove the word 'school' from all the page titles and URLs. I asked why. They responded: "We heard if the gays find out we have a preschool, they can force us to teach the children to be gay. We think it's safest if nobody can see that we're a school. And we don't want to come up on any Google searches dealing with 'school.'"
If you haven't seen it yet, "You Suck at Photoshop" on youtube is also made of awesome.
Posted by: Phelps | Monday, January 04, 2010 at 02:37 PM
Oh yeah, absolutely -- "Donnie" is a legend as far as I'm concerned!
Posted by: Rogier | Monday, January 04, 2010 at 04:51 PM
The Clients from Hell could easily be from my company. We always hired a graphic artist who quit in frustration after a few months. It turned out all we needed was a trained monkey who knew how to use graphic software enough to implement design decisions by a committee of managers. I knew enough of Inkscape and Gimp to put on another hat at the end...
Posted by: Jozef | Tuesday, January 05, 2010 at 05:34 AM
Sounds like that school listens to Dr Dobson or reads Joe Farah too much.
Posted by: the friendly grizzly | Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 09:08 PM
All I know about graphics is the one that enhances our computer .:))
Posted by: Lala Key | Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 08:13 PM