Clients From Hell

Since 2009, a group of young designers has been publishing “Clients From Hell,” a blog that’s part humor, party therapy for any designer whose ever had a difficult, rude or downright moronic client – and really, who hasn’t? It was only a matter of time until the site developed enough content for a book, and that time has finally arrived. It makes a great gift for any disgruntled designer friends. Here are few choice tidbits:

“Can we make the cat in the animation look less sexy when it licks the window? It has closed eyes, which are making me think it’s sexual.”

I asked a client to sign up for a sharing website and send me the link so I could upload files to it. Here is what they sent me:

“Here’s the link to the Share account I created: C:Documents and SettingsMy DocumentsShareBox”

“I want to do something kinda fun with the “buy now” button, where if when the mouse tracks close to it you can hear people getting ready to cheer. And when you’ve hovered over it the people burst out into applause?”

“Could you please send me a different file— one that is not a… what’s it called…jpg? I spent the last two hours trying to copy the text from this thing, and it is driving me crazy!”

I finally agreed to put all the content for this client’s website within one copydeck and send it to her in a Word document, asking her to revise and correct before we integrated it.

CLIENT: “I just sent you the corrected copydeck.”

ME: (checking my emails) “I don’t see it. When did you send it?”

CLIENT: “A few moments ago. Check your fax.”

ME: “Whoa, what, no… And this is all in handwriting too?!”

CLIENT: “Yup…”

ME: “We don’t have the resources to rewrite the entire document based on your handwriting. Please, do all the corrections in the Word Document, like we asked, and send it to us so we can integrate it on the website.”
She sent me the Word Document a couple hours later – she had scanned the faxed document and copied – pasted it in the .doc, telling me that she expected her website live any time now, since we had everything. Sigh.

CLIENT: “I hate the color yellow. Don’t ever use it. Nothing good has ever been yellow: urine, dead skin, um, hippy’s shirts, the desert… you get the point.”
ME: “What about lions?”
CLIENT: “Lions are just fruity tigers.”

“One more thing that needs to be programmed is maybe a java script, upon clicking the X button on the internet browser or the page itself, with a pop-up message box that says: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO LEAVE NOW?! Then this thing can go live!”

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