Freelance Freedom #118

This reminds me of the time a client complained about the green colours in his design. Clients have every right to complain about the chose colour scheme, only I hadn’t incorporated any yellow at all.

It took as about a week to find out what the problem was. I visited the client and appearantly his screen wasn’t functioning very well. Everything blue showed up kind of green-ish!

I seldom had that much trouble not bursting into tears (laughing tears that is) as then!

It still amazes me that some people don’t notice the horrible degradation that happens when images are stretched. “Looks fine to me” has come up more times than I’d like to tell.

Story. Of. My. Life.

Oh this is pretty much EXACTLY what I am doing right now!

Not to mention clients who suffer of a red-green-colorblindness whilest not even knowing about it ..

cu, w0lf.

I was recently doing some volunteer work for a cause (an environmental issue that is now in court, but at the time it was used to organize their protests online), my boyfriend’s mother was very involved, so I offered to help for brownie points. There was talk of getting some sort of (small) donation together, but most of these people are either retired or taking the summer off for the protest.

I was working with another volunteer, 20-30 years my senior and a picture-perfect digital immigrant stereotype. Originally she had offered to help as a writer, but it didn’t take us very long to throw that idea out the window–we spent more time editing her work than it would take to re-write from scratch. She had also taken a “web design course” at some point in the last decade or so. Those are the worst, because they think they have the knowledge and credentials to understand and dictate what we do as web designers/developers… ha!

I had originally been told to give the layout a monochrome blue look. After the design process, coding and wordpress implementation, she decided that the layout (featuring water, by the way) needed to be forest green. I’d already volunteered over two weeks of my life at this point, not to mention that it’s a shitty idea anyway. Not happening for a volunteer project, not worth the brownie points past this.

A few of us played email/phone tag for about a week, and somehow I finally managed to explain to the (“certified”–because that’s a relevant term in this field) woman that it WAS a big deal. The response? “Oh. I thought you’d only have to change a couple of letters in the code or something.”

She thought I’d only have to change the #color..

This hits the nail on the head. This happens a lot on in print, especially when you turn something over to a newspaper. I used to work for a paper and when they didn’t want “hole” they would stretch ads a bit to fill out the page.

This has happened to me more times than I can count. What always blows the mind is like steelfrog says, “It looks fine to me!” How on Earth can you NOT see that!!!!!!

Not to mention that the banner could get stretch marks, now that would really be ugly, wouldn’t it!

can’t he just make the background transparent and don’t change the size, everthing thing should look perfect a way to go

Nice one… It’s the worst when you get specifications for a design and the client changes the final outcome and you have no control of it.

So true. Reminds me of a PDF doc I designed for a client. They kept complaining of bad aliasing. I asked if they were viewing it at 100%, which they affirmed over and over. Finally they sent me a screen shot and, oh look the scale says 103%! They were pretty embarrassed, understandably.

As Adam said, is much worst when the client “murders” your work after you delivered it. It has happen to me once and for a second It felt like a kick in the nuts.
About the cartoon, most customers can’t understand the aspect ratio concept. It’s not a very big deal when the new size has the same ratio but it almost never happens…

Awesome, a Freelance Freedom on my B-day. XD
And man, do I know how he feels. :/ I hate it when a client complains to me that a picture gets pixelated when they use it in a size it was never meant to be in.

just press the resize button duuuuude !! .. LOL !

This is something that continues to boggle me about the developer-client relationships. Many client’s, God love em, don’t seem to understand at all just how long web-related changes take.

I’ve never understood where this attitude started – my only guess is it began back in the days of the dot.com cowboys where Project Managers would tell a client “sure we can do that for you today” and then work a team of designers and developers all night to get it done.

Thank goodness those days are (mostly) behind us and as web professionals WE are now responsible for educating and communicating with our clients.

Ohhhh I’ve been here.

“Hey we need a A3 poster which has a photo of our band”

“Ok great, you have a High Res photo right?”

“Hmmm, nah. Can’t you just grab something off our myspace photo page?”

There is a large market from which a freelance writer can choose, and the sky is the limit as to what type of genre or how much work a freelance writer might have at any given time. A freelance writer whose specialty is fiction might dabble in poetry, short stories or e-books, or he might have an ongoing novel in the works. Many publishers will accept fiction but most freelance writers agree it is a much harder market to break into.

Yeah… I worked for kinkos back in college and once we had a girl walk in with a pixelated picture of starry night printed on a crappy piece of 8.5 x 11 computer paper. She handed it to me and said, “I’d like this blown up on glossy poster paper and less pixelated, please.” …

The ‘resize’ button, ah yes, that’s the one just next to the ‘instant copy fit’ button.

Loved this mock-u-mercial http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

What a great rendition of the almost daily occurence in the creative world.
If only I had a dollar for everytime that happens!

Takes a designer to truly appreciate how even a tiny change can affect the whole creative process. Great one!

If I had a dollar for every time I had a situation like that…

I can’t count how many times I’ve had this happen!

My other favorite close variation is “We need a half page ad made.” “OK…fine…what are the dimensions?” “It’s a half page ad so just design that and let me see it.” Do these people not realize that half of 8.5×11 is not the same as half of 4×8 or something?

LOL
I’m not a designer, but I used to draw for the university paper, and they never gave me information about the dimensions.
I’ve had small drawings made huge, big elaborate ones made tiny, and oh yeah, two separate ones that come one after the other (a comic, sort of) switched. But that’s for another comic.

BTW, in my field (web developing – i.e. the more programming / technical side) if you’d say something like that the client would think that you’re really unprofessional. Even THEY have heard of the resize button. I’ve run into several problems in situations like this (and others when they can imagine the solution and I “only” have to bring it into life and my part is taking longer)