Stupid customers...

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

http://www.clientcopia.com

Have fun!
Oh, and maybe we can post some things we experienced with stupid customers here.

“I send you the image in *.doc-format” (I worked in a printing office)

“Can you print my name in these businesscards” (Which were already cut…)

"Can we print a poster from this image from our homepage…

“I did it in M$ Publisher” Nooooooooooooooooooooo

And one which gave me nightmare more than once: "I did the scans myself, our driver will bring you the (1!) floppy(!) " (Needed were 300dpi-scans of about 10 images…)

2

Brilliant site. Gave me laughs for about an hour.

3

I couldn’t stop. I read all of them…

4

haha. good link.

reminds me of the website i should create for the charity project at school:

math teacher: i want to have this, this and this on the website.

me: you will have to give me some content. im not going to type that out.

a few days later i had a mockup showing the beginning of the site. it was still white and stuff but the layout was ready.

after some weeks asking for content and more info about how it should look i gave up.

when i walked into the computer science class some days after that the teacher asked me why i didnt work at the website.

me: well, mr … hadnt given me some content and stuff so i couldnt do much.

teacher: ive made something. if you make something from that…
what he showed me was the frontpage looking website i was trying not to make.

some days after that i began learning blender.

5

That site is a riot. Luckily I haven’t had clients that stupid (to be honest I barely have even had clients.) Too funny!

6

Well I for one am left with a bad taste in my mouth…

Although a lot of the anecdotes posted on that website are humorous, many of them merely point out the unprofessional attitude of certain designers (although what I am about to say applies just as easily to the techie/IT stories).

I’m reminded of a story Paula Scher has told about her early career; one of her collegues had some materials that he regularly presented to clients. Paula was flipping through them and came to one that had large letters set in Times New Roman with a caption that read ‘this a serif font, that means it has little ‘feet’ attatched to it’. At first she laughed, then she stopped herself and realized how very serious it was. The customers hire us to be designers so they don’t have to be. Your services are a tool to them and they only need to know as much about the field as is required for them to do their job so you can do yours. This does not make them intellectually inferior, it only makes them professionals. Finally Paula realized that as a designer it was her proffesional responsibility to communicate things to her clients without using technical jargon and breaking it down to basics like the type chart she was looking at did.

I don’t blame the webmaster for the content on the site, however I am kinnd of shocked to see that the stories that illustrate, above all else, a designer with a bad attitude are getting rated with 5 stars.

Cheers (and jeers),
Zarf

7

I understand, but when a customer asks you to flip an image of a product in Photoshop so they can see the other side of it, it’s not easy to take it seriously. Some people’s ignorance is hard to tolerate, especially if you have to deal with it multiple times every day. From both point of views we are only human. Stupidity is in our nature, and arrogance is, too. Live on.

8

Trust me, Iv’e dealt with difficult clients before. I don’t even think we shoujld take unreasonable/impossible requests seriously, perhaps I was a bit unclear in my original post. I even think it’s ok to be amused with their strange requests to a certain degree. It’s when your attitude veers towards elitism and denegration of the clients intelligence that your creating an unhealthy working relationship. As long as they are ignorant but sincere and honest it makes little sense to foster animosity, which is what a lot of the comments on that site do.

BTW I found this one interesting.

http://www.clientcopia.com/quotes.php?id=981

Interestingly enough, the client’s request was not totally incomprehensible to anyone who knows basic color theory.

Cheers,
Zarf

9

Yeah I agree with Zarf there, that client request made complete sense and its an easy change to make in the design process, a lot less disruptive than layout changes.

10

You do make a very good point. Unfortunately, like I was talking about human nature, we are all intolerant and discriminatory to our own degree. For example, your tolerance is greater than average, and for that I show nothing but complete respect for you. The people who posted on that website have a lower level of tolerance, and I think the exact same way about them, too. We are all individuals, and it’s awesome that we are all so different. If not, life would be unimaginally boring.

If everything was just peachy and we all thought the same about everybody else, we wouldn’t even know the difference between right and wrong. Our lack of knowledge would be a blessing in this case. Because it doesn’t work that way, there’s only one possible thing that everybody in the world can agree on: we are all different.

“Just remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.”

PS: Sorry for taking your idea and turning it into a general thought of life. It was the only way I could debate such good ideas without lying. :slight_smile:

11

I’m never angry for someone being a novice to computer related task. I get mad when they use that awful awful term “computer illiterate” to justfiy their refusal to learn. Most of the time, all the people need to do is learn how to read th help file. Help files are there for a reason, and almost nobody uses them. People will have a problem, and instead of trying to figure it out and solve it, they say they are “computer illiterate” and whine until someone comes over and plugs the computer in. People who are skilled with computers are usually people who can think logically and solve problems. However, if you can’t deal with that kinda crap, then you shouldn’t be a designer/tech support.

12

Haha, Valarking you hit the nail right on the head.

At work I’m constantly struggling to get my co-workers to start solving basic problems for themselves instead of running to me every time they have a problem. Sometimes it’s copy/paste, sometimes font size, other times worse. Recently I ordered some mailing labels to run through the laserjet, so that some routine mailings could be done quicker (she’d been writing them by hand). When I tried to explain how it worked (I was going to create the page for her and subsequently she would just pull up the file, load the printer, and print) she grasped her head and said something like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you can just do it when we need them.” Most of the time I find that these people are like that with everything, not just computers. One of my co-workers once suggested that I let a professional fix my car when I explained that I had a problem with my brake pedal because the rubber piece that holds down the brake light switch rotted out. I fixed it with superglue and a small rubber foot, btw…

13

Zarf i don’t know your opinion on this one.

(i am a designer BTW, as you may know)

i went to a digital printers with a .PNG file, i was trying a new printing company.

i print all my A3 300Dpi images from PNGs’ because of their size, and because i don’t need any fonts… i know what i am getting.

well the printer is like "why are you using this format. its a motion graphic format, you use these only for flash animations and stuff.

i was like “well my understanding is that PNG is just a compressed lossless image format, like tiff but comnpressed. and it should print just like anything else” (i have printed PNG images at every other printers in town LOL)

the CD had a PNG, and a PSD on the same disk (same file)

he prints it off relucant to use the PNG (i don’t think he did) it was an RGB file. it comes out green (was grey on screen, even on his screen)

he starts going off at me saying it should be CMYK coz their printers can’t handlge RGB (i’m thinking, WTF you guys are the printers, your system should do RGB-CMYK conversion on the fly, and it should be calibrated to your monitors at least)

i think he used the Photoshop file because some of the printing (the parts of the image that were just bitmaps in photoshop) were fine, whereas every area with a filter layer or another photoshop altered area was all green.

then he says “its coz its not CMYK”.

so i say “well can you change it to CMYK for me, and how much will that cost”

he says he’ll do it for free and charge me for the original print.

so he changes it and prints it out. this time THE WHOLE THING IS GREEN (not just most of it)

then he blames it on my PNG format, again quoting that he knows so much about it because his friends have done motion graphics.

i don’t pay them anything, and i eat my pride not bothering to argue with the guy about PNG images, looking confused as if its all my fault.

i go to the printer down the road, and it all comes out perfect.

not going back there again.

Alltaken

14

Clients have driven me completely nuts over the last couple of years… to the point that I considered career - change …

Once this company calls me up cause they wanted me to design a GUI for their new website. Since they had zillions of programmers and no designers we agreed that I’d just do the design of the interface and get the programmers going after that.

After 2 weeks of work / meetings / repeated positively asnwered questions about the INTERFACE DESIGN ONLY, the freak asks me 1 day before the deadline if I can show him the OTHER 20 PAGES OF THE WEBSITE! Wich we ofcourse agreed upon (10000000000 times) that his freaking programmers would do…

Client: “Yes I know that we agreed on a design for the interface, but in my opinion that means also the other 20 pages of layout and programming and design of the website…”

– WTF?!.. so anything you think about and don’t tell me is suddenly a part of the project ??? —

me: “I see, then how come we never talked about that part, agreed differently and you didn’t even give me any info about what / how the pages should look / do etc etc etc…”

Client: “I come to you for a website! You have 2 days!”

Thank god I had a good contract…
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! and this website is a database driven site, ASP, needs to be designed, minimum of 20 pages and he freaking things it’s gonna be done in 1.5 weeks, without telling me anything and also agreeing on something totally different! AND answering me positively 1000 times after I EXPLAIN EVERYTHING another 1000 times…

Sorry… this stuff just get to me … too much…

md01

15

Actually I do have an opinion about this.

Obviously the guy was acting like a jerk. The line about png’s being for motion graphics only was a load of bull too.

However I wouldn’t use PNG’s, and quite honestly I wouldn’t recommend you do either. Save it as a pdf with zip compression or JPEG with maximum quality (the loss is unnoticable to the human eye at this setting and it cuts file sizes dramatically.) Oviously this is only appropriate for final output.

If I am taking my work anywhere to be printed I always work in CMYK from the beginning or convert to CMYK on my system and check for any out of gamut colors. The CMYK colorspace is the smallest of all, and many colors in RGB are well outside the gamut for CMYK. When an rgb value is out of gamut and you send it to the printer it is going to be clamped to a value that is within the CMYK color space. This presents two problems:

  1. The device that does the conversion may have a different idea than you about what is an acceptable CMYK value to clamp too.
  2. Different devices will go about the conversion differently.

At my job we have a nice Firey X12 rip station that does the conversion really well most of them time. Our oversize machine however uses an internal RIP, that is not nearly as good so I never send an RGB file to it if I can help it. Either the second printer had better equipment, or you just got lucky.

Finally pdf’s do a very good job of matching colors across different devices. Use them.

All of this should have been communicated to you by him, so I guess what I am saying, in a roundabout way, was that he was acting in the exact same way as the people I was complaining about in the first place.

Cheers,
Zarf

16

ok one more question about the printing then.

using colour profiles, do you guys use them for the printing?

and with the CMYK space, i have had more varied results across printing firms with CMYK than normal. formats like Freehand files and such seem to give major problems with matching CMYK images in the with CMYK colours within them but RGB seem to be fine (at both cheap and expensive printing companys)

i’ll try the CMYK advice next time, and will try PDF or JPG. is the only reason you don’t use PNG because it doesn’t take CMYK colour?

thanks

and i might try to pick your brain on other questions about printing if thats cool with you?

it will benifit me a lot in my lifetime.

Alltaken

17

It depends. If creating a graphic from scratch it’s wise to use cmyk from the beginning as told. About using color profiles, it’s not that easy, you can do really bad things to your graphics, if you don’t know exactly know what you do. I usually advice people to let the prepress studio do the separations as they (should) know abut it. You can however use separation profiles (icc) to turn your graphics into cmyk. These you can get from the printing shop sometimes, or use standard profiles (i used profiles from FOGRA, kinda institute for standartisation of ink and colors and stuff in Germany, available for different sorts of papers and printing machines), maybe look for such standarts in your country (as they use different colors… ever wondered about Euroscale and so on?)
Again, working with profiles is not that easy, it’s color managing! And calibration!! If you get the chance, let a pro show you on his Mac, how your blended image will look on different papers (coated, uncoated, newspaper). This will show you, that you can do things terribly wrong, if separating with a wrong profile! And usings profiles is plain useless, if your equipment isn’t calibrated.
However, i’m kinda out of this for some time now so you might want to follow some of this links:
http://www.color.org/links2.html

Hope Zarf can tell you more about it…

D.

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I’m still going…

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I’m still going…[/quote]

Me 2.
Yes, there are a lot of stupid people out there, but it seems about 1/2 show that graphics artists/web designers can’t interact with non-graphics/non-technical people.

20

We were hosting a course for a major beer distributor with a 3rd party ASP. I swear they must’ve used the stuff to brew their coffee with.

Client: How will they know how to log in?

Me: We’ll send them an e-mail with usernames and passwords.

Client: How do you know what their usernames are?

Me: We usually just use their e-mail addresses. The password is randomly generated.

Client: Oh that’s no good. I don’t want them to have to remember another name and password. Can’t you make it the same as their network passwords?

Me: Then I would know their network passwords, you don’t want that.

Client: Oh. Humm…uh…what if we make it the same for all of them?

Me: Uh…they would still need to remember it.

Client: But it would be easier.

Me: I don’t really see how. Besides, they could log in as someone else.

Client: They won’t know they all have the same password. Just make it _________. (It was an obvious word, not ‘password’.)

Me: I think they’ll figure that one out pretty quick. Maybe you should tack a number on the end so it at least looks randomly generated.

Client: No, no, that’s too complicated, I don’t want to confuse them.

Then again, if they’re all as bright as him, maybe they won’t figure it out.

lol!