A client contacted me on Monday, looking to have a sign for outside their front door designed. Here's the design brief that I got:
From: Dali Restaurant
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2011 10:43 AM
Hi,
Here's the basic sign- but we want the D and the W VERY ornate- something like Lucida Blackletter? I don't have it on my computer, so I can't tell what it looks like. We want something scrolly so that it really stands out. I'd like different divider symbols between the sun-wed and thu-sat and the hours.
I need to see the layout first.
Using this, here's what I came up with.
As a first draft, I was pretty happy with it. There are a few things that irked me about the layout of the text below the logo, but the logo I was really happy with.
There's lots of cool, old style hand work on these letters, all of which takes time.
Truth be told, I think this design is almost worthy of a dribbble invite. If anyone's got one and agrees, send one over!
The first round of feedback came in, and I was less than pleased.
From: Dali Restaurant
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:03AM
Looks ok, a couple changes. Please remove the border, and use our colors- Reflex blue for the background, and pms 681 for the letters. Can you move the "and" between the D and the W?
Thanks
Ok. Big changes, but maybe I'll show it to her, and she'll see how bad it looks. I made the changes and sent her back the proof, which looked like this.
I got an email back almost instantly, and I was hoping that the internet's bad design filter had rejected my email. Then I was hoping to open the email and see "ohmygod that's terrible, print the one you made." Nope. I got "Can you change all of the text other than the D and W to times new roman?"
To which I sent this. You can see by how off-center the bottom text is that I've officially stopped caring. I even changed "Thu" to "Tue"
Which yielded this gem:
"Please change "tue" to "thurs" and replace the little leaf with a diamond design. Do you have any other letter font options to choose from? These are lovely, but I'd like a few choices before the final decision."
Normally, I'd cut my losses at this point and tell the client that things just aren't doing to work out between us; I decided I was going to make this job into a blog so I figured I'd follow it all the way through. Here's the final result, and a look back at where we came from:
What would you do in a situation like this? Acquiesce to the customer's wants, even at the expense of the design? Cancel the job? I've tried hard this year to concentrate on "good design" over "fast design", and I feel so much better about my original design than the final product. Hopefully I can develop more clients that appreciate the work that goes into creating something from scratch!
On a somewhat related, yet unrelated note, on Monday morning, I'll be starting to work at Hassan Sign in Cohasset. I'm greatly excited to be working for a company that puts out work like this!
On a somewhat related, yet unrelated note, on Monday morning, I'll be starting to work at Hassan Sign in Cohasset. I'm greatly excited to be working for a company that puts out work like this!
