Tyrian purple
“Can you make the purple more royal?”
Since Roman times, purple has been a traditional colour of royalty, as it was one of the most expensive dyes available. Specifically the type of purple this client was looking for is Tyrian.
Tools of the trade
“Hold on, you’re losing me. Is Dreamweaver a book or something?”
I really hope this was either from 1998 or the designer is charging $2 an hour.
Timeless
Client: We want a banner.
Me: Okay.
Client: We want a classic look, but modern.
I’m not really sure why anybody considers this brief too hard, I’ve seen it plenty of times. The word they’re looking for is timeless. It needs to look like it was designed today, but seem like it’s always been around.
This watch is by Georg Jensen of Denmark. It’s a classic look, designed in 1978, but yet modern – you might argue it was timeless.
Lucky 13
“I like concept 13… but what’s putting me off is that 13 is an unlucky number. We better go with 12.”
This is probably a bit unfair to pick on, but many buildings do not have a 13th floor (such as Canary Wharf in London) and many modern housing estates skip #13 due to triskaidekaphobia. In much of Asia, many people have a fear of the number 4. Designers and developers should be aware of clients’ needs from around the world.
Automagically
“Please do me a small favor and convert all 357 word documents into pdf format.”
This is a tricky one without knowing certain circumstances. But then both this and Clients From Hell rely on your not knowing the circumstances, so I shall continue.
Word documents are rubbish. Formatting moves around, if you haven’t got the same typeface, it’ll load up a default, and if you haven’t got Word installed, goodness knows what you’ll see. If you need to provide documents for people to print off and look at, while retaining the typeface you used and layout, then PDF is the quickest way to do it. As a developer or designer, you’re probably going to be better equipped to deal with this than somebody in a corporate environment with Windows XP locked down to Office and Internet Explorer.
The mystery of semi-bold
Client: “Can you make the headline semi-bold?”
Me: “Semi-bold?”
Client: “Yes. Bold is too bold and unbold isn’t bold enough. I think it needs to be semi-bold.”
Me: “… I can bold every other letter.”
Client: “I don’t need to know the technical details, as long as it’s semi-bold.”
What a great post to start with. The purpose of this blog is to take some of the things that clients supposedly say on blogs such as Clients From Hell, and reveal that actually the designer or developer in question isn’t really doing their job and could probably give a bit of a hand. Your mechanic doesn’t expect you to know how the gearbox works and a train driver doesn’t expect the passengers to understand the signalling system of a major railway station.
However, when a client asks for something that actually exists (and is Completely Reasonable), I do have to wonder what the designer thought was the problem?
Anyway, let’s look at Futura, for example. One might consider Book to be normal. Some may feel that’s too heavy, and that Light is better for most cases. Weighing in higher up are Bold and Extra Bold. So what is less than bold, but not light? Well, that would be Medium.
Other fonts, including Adobe Text Pro, actually have a weight called Semibold, just to really drive the point home.
So next time your client asks for something that isn’t too bold (too hot), but isn’t just normal (too cold), try looking for medium (just right).
