How To Drive A Graphic Designer cRaZy

Graphic Designer
Image via Flickr by jbaij

In case you don’t realize, this post is suppose to be sarcastic and funny.

Who do these graphic designers think they are? I mean, it’s the client that came up with the idea to get something designed, it’s the client that is picking out the colors, it’s the client that’s doing all the work. Right? All the designer is doing is putting some colors on a screen.

Over the years, here is what I’ve found out that can drive your graphic designer crazy. Not sure why, but those guys are touchy.

Microsoft Office

If you’ve got a great idea, put it into Word and send it to the designer. Got images? Toss them into Word too. Flowcharts are definitely best in Excel. All your assets should come in some Microsoft document because everyone loves Microsoft Office.

Fonts

Comic Sans is the best font ever. Hands down.

More is better

What’s all that white space? Lets add some images up in that margin. Also, we can shorten up the page if we get rid of all that white space in-between paragraphs. Margins and padding are for dummies. That’s valuable real estate. Ohh maybe we could put some clip art up there.

The Logo

Always send your logos to the graphic designer in a Word document. Didn’t we already learn this? It should be small and low quality. Don’t worry, they’ll be able to perform magic and make it look awesome; at no extra cost of course. Once they get it in the design, always ask for it to be bigger. Bigger is better.

Get Specific Generic

Here are good things to say to your designer: I want a design that really speaks to me. Something that is now. Can we add a little pizazz and jazz it up just a bit? Make it pop. Our goal here is to make it beautiful.

Then when the designer adds pizazz and all that jazz, tell them that you don’t want your website to look like that. What the hell were they thinking?

Colors

Pick colors like red and blue because they are patriotic. And when the design comes back to you, tell them you didn’t want red red. Have them bump it down a notch. And that blue is to blue. How about we change that to more of a sky blue. And where is the green?

Deadlines

Take your time approving the design. This is an important decision so take days, weeks or even longer. But once you give the feedback, demand that the designer turn it around in less than 24 hours. I mean, how hard can his job be? You did all the work here.

And we’re done!

This is great, it’s perfect. We’re all done, except can we make the lady a little more happy and that blue is more of a morning sky blue, can we change it to evening sky blue?

Ohh and I have another project for you. Since you know my style, can we do it in 1/2 the time and cost this time? It’s pretty much the same thing, only different colors and layout.

This post was inspired by hullom.wordpress.com.

16 thoughts on “How To Drive A Graphic Designer cRaZy”

  1. you would be the reason why we charge you guys so much… and your "doing everything and not the designer" is only a therory… we deal with the people that cant draw a stick figure to save their lives… we make the thoughts that the client comes up with come to life… if you were my customer i would send your crap back to you and tell you that there will be extra charges for stupidity.

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  2. This happens sometimes. So you educate them about your workflow, as you learn about their industry. Clients are our friends.

    @Dustin: sleep more, eat healthy, and don't take it serious πŸ˜€

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  3. Very true and very frustrating having to deal with a certain customer, I gave up web designing because of those people…."Purple, no lets make it more Lavender, it's not purple enough, can we make it lighter just a notch?". I swear I can relate to this post, brought back old memories.

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  4. Funny article. I am thinking of writing my own: "How to drive an editor crazy by writing an article on how to drive your graphic designer crazy, of which contains way too many grammatical errors" Do you think my title is too wordy? LOL

    I don't have time to go into them all, but just for starters: "suppose to be" should be written as "supposed to be", "Right?" is a word, NOT a complete sentence, "Ohh" only has one "h" (you did this several times), "that blue is to blue" to is spelled "too" when used that way, and please, please, please use more commas! Please also understand I am writing this with a smile on my face, and I hope you read this w/a smile too! thx!

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  5. don't forget to have your family, friends, entire neighborhood, dentist, and random people on the bus critique the design. especially ask your cousin's chiropractor's twelve year old niece to offer tips on improving the logo.

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  6. Preachin’ to the choir. I design and manage my own website, as well as design two or three a year on the side, and I’ve had numerous clients over the years insist on using Comic Sans. And if a few operating systems (Mac OS, Linux distros) don’t have it installed, who cares? Windows is the best OS in the world for everything. Office was *designed* for Windows.

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