During my times as a freelance designer—prior to being captured by White Whale—a majority of my clients were small businesses and entrepreneurial one-(wo)man-shows. These clients, and thus the functional beauty that I created for them, differed vastly in a myriad of ways and yet they all had nearly the same exact critiques of the comps that I would deliver to them. Those of you who have worked as designers are likely intimately familiar with these exact requests for revision:
- Even when it is a perfectly acceptable size and is not screaming “THIS IS THE NAME OF MY COMPANY!!!”, they ask “Can you make my logo BIGGER?”
- After painstakingly designing the whitespace of their design in the interest of facilitating a bit of visual respiration, the client notes that there “should be more content because the page feels empty in spots”.
- And then we have the infamous “The headlines need to be brighter and much larger”
In my Saturday morning internet perusing (it is at times sadly amusing that this is what has taken the place of cartoons in my adult life), I stumbled upon this; apparently our brethren have taken to satire as a vehicle for alleviating their work-related frustrations. While its easy to laugh about now, I am truly thankful that White Whale has largely pulled me from disputes over these issues; out of the several WW clients that I’ve been involved with, I don’t remember any of these issues being major points of dissent; here’s to having higher ed. clients!
Editor’s note: Yes, Douglas, but that’s because we usually make the logo really big anyway.