Client: “I have attached the pictures I would like on my website. I am looking for a dark and mysterious look and feel.”

Me: “I just opened your pictures and noticed that they are all of My Little Pony.”

Client: “Oh, gosh, I am so sorry. Those are meant for my daughter’s birthday cake. Attached are the actual images I would like. Sorry.”

Me: “Sorry to bother you again, but these pictures are all from Woodstock.”

Client: “Yes, that’s correct.”

The client was looking for a professional website for their detective business.

Client: “I’ve worked with web designers before. I used to work at a large firm and was in charge of helping with the website there. I will be able to help you a lot. Here are a few images that we’d like to use on the site.”

Me: “These are pretty low quality, but for how big they’ll be on the site, I could make it work. Are these your only copies?”

Client: “Oh, I have some larger files! How would you like me to send them to you?”

Me: “You could zip them into a single archive file, upload that to [fileshare of choice], and send me a link, or you could put them in the [cloud storage] box we’ve been using. Or you could FTP them into the site’s ‘img’ folder for me. Let me know what you decide.”

Client: “You lost me at ‘zip’. Here’s the first image.”

With forty-plus emails arriving (and more with each passing second), each featuring 20MB-plus attachments, I’m typing this story in frustration.

Me: “I can’t use the photos you put into the Word Doc for your website. I need the original JPEGs.”

Client: “I don’t understand. How did people put pictures on websites before computers and Internet?”

For the final component of a branding campaign, I was designing an email marketing piece to announce the launch of the website.

Client: “The design looks great! But we want the call to action to really stand out, so bold and underline this line of text, then this one, and finally, this one.”

Me: “Those three lines of text are the only thing in the entire copy.”

Client: “We think that this will make it really clear which one is most important.”

Me: “By bolding and underlining everything?”

Client: “Yeah. What aren’t you getting here?”

I work for a major graphic design agency, and my direct client is a big financial institution. A lot of the work consists of designing landing pages for them using a very limited list of elements, colors, images, and layouts. It’s up to me to use the existing files to create something to their liking every time.

We have been working on a specific site for weeks. The internal art team loved every version of the project presented to them, and I received comments like, “We love the direction this is going,” and, “Great job,” and, “You’re almost there.”

Today, I was happily working on the last set of tweaks to the site with a few hours to spare before the final presentation to the customer. 

I got an email from the external art director, who is the only direct link to the client and has been part of all previous meetings.

Client: “Hi! Great job on the design so far. Only one small detail I forgot to mention: the client doesn’t want to use any existing assets, colors, or layouts for this project. It needs to look more ‘premium’, ‘fancy’, and ‘special’. Oh, and the presentation meeting will be one hour earlier.”