Special effects are totally needed here

[earl colby pottinger]

Programmer

As a programmer I learnt after being burnt a few times to get *ALL* the specs early, you may needed to get a simple demo going first but you get the final specs into the contract.

THEN EVERY SINGLE CHANGE IS CHARGEABLE! EVERY CHANGE, NO EXCEPTIONS!!!

It is amazing how few changes a client asks for when they stop thinking of them as free and easy. Then if you put out crud, you are putting out well paid crud.

By doing this I have not put out crud in decades, but my ears have been abused with the wailing and pleading to do 'just one little thing for free".

[RecoveringKinkoid]

As someone who is used to balancing what the customer wants and harsh reality, I think it would have been far more professional to have pointed out that what he wants is a little overblown and then asking to what end he wants the lens flairs for in the first place.

Perhaps the customer wanted to accentuate the products somehow to get them to stand out in the minds of the web surfers on his page.

Perhaps a lens flare would be ok for the Top of the Line model, the showpiece of the collection and something a little less flashy, yet still making the product stand out, might have been the happy medium.

.

See, I totally agree with this. Sometimes, they are trying to get some point across with their "effects" and just simply don't know better ways to get that point across. That's where the designer comes in. In fact, in the intance here, I think a lens flare would be fun and effective.

Of course you can't habitually refuse clients requests. You should try to guide them in a professional manner.

You can gnash your teeth, just don't let them see you doing it.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

See, this is why I couldn't be a web designer or graphic artist. I'd be telling too many clients to go fuck. I'm not putting my name on crap. Especially when other people will see I created that crap and go elsewhere for their design needs.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

I have told someone that if they told anyone I had anything to do with their creative, by God and sonny Jesus I would sue them.

[Amanita]

Not a graphic designer here, but I can totally relate- I made my friend a Jedi outfit, but she wears the thing so poorly (can't even figure out how to wrap the tunics properly) that I am embarrassed to admit I made it, since it looks so sloppy. Looking at her next to me, you might never know the outfits were both made by the same person- it's all in how the things are worn.

So I can completely relate to the frustrations of doing good work for somebody, that somebody fucking it up after the fact, and you then not even wanting to be known as the one who did it in the first place.

[Cookie]

As a graphic designer, I resent the hell out of it when someone hires me, presumably to design something for them, then turns around and refuses to let me design the damn thing.

Yes, yes, and yes. While I'm not a graphic designer, I know several and this is the general sentiment. If you want it to look like a late night infomercial from the 80s, then they need to hire somebody who produces that crap, not a quality designer whose name will forever be on that piece of utter crap.

[Magpie]

Can we let whoever sets the local curriculum know this? I had several arguments with my teachers that "the reason my brochures look bad is that I am not a graphic designer. I have no desire to try something for which I have neither the aptitude or training. I'd rather do a good job on something which doesn't look as nice, and at least it will look well-done."

[Dips]

web designers are not mechanics, they are artists if i commission an artist to apint a picture of a landscape and they did not paint one of the buildings because they deemed it ugly then they are refusing to do their job, likewise with a web designer it doesn't matter if they like the colours i choose or the style i want their job is to follow their clients orders.

Are you a web designer? No?

If you believe you know someone's job descrition better than a person who actually does that job, feel free to start a thread on fratching about it.

this is turning into fratching territory.

If you believe a thread is straying into fratching territory please use the report button instead of responding. Reporting is the only way to be sure the mods will know about a problem right away.

[mharbourgirl]

So I can completely relate to the frustrations of doing good work for somebody, that somebody fucking it up after the fact, and you then not even wanting to be known as the one who did it in the first place.

Oh god, I swear this sums up the last three weeks at work. I'm not an artist, my job description is Word Processor, but it's not just writing business letters. I don't write business letters. Aside from being records manager, it's my job to proofread technical reports written by the engineers in my firm for spelling (lots of obscure latin words, OMG), grammar (how do you get a Ph.D. without having more than a shaky grasp of English grammar???), and make sure they're set up in the standard company format. It takes a lot of tedious, mind-numbing work to get things to my personal standards, and I like to think I'm very good at what I do. How many people can make Word do what it's told?

So when I have been accruing serious overtime to fix a botched 400-page document, I am not going to be thrilled when the person who was supposed to fix one missed page-numbering issue and then send it to the printer takes it on themselves to reformat half the document, undoing 30 hours of MY work. They thought I'd want them to put in about 400 internal hyperlinks when I'd spent the aforesaid 30 hours REMOVING them all because they were buggering up the entire report.

And then they had the nerve to complain about how much time it took them.

I didn't make a post because this twit isn't a customer. For a change, the customer wasn't the one giving me grief. This one is a co-worker from another branch, and if it wasn't in another province, I'd be giving them a lesson in Word applied rectally.

[Magpie]

Aside from being records manager, it's my job to proofread technical reports written by the engineers in my firm for spelling (lots of obscure latin words, OMG), grammar (how do you get a Ph.D. without having more than a shaky grasp of English grammar???),

You get it by being in a field where it was common practice in undergrad to not worry about marks lost for spelling/grammar/style, because they were just BS marks, so it didn't matter. You know how to write, so you only care about marks for things that matter. (I'm not sure whether I think this is more stupid in technical courses, where you have a very strict set of rules that even monkeys like me can just follow blindly, or in arts courses where style matters more.)