Design and Torture
As part of my (admittedly fiendishly underpaid) work, I regularly have to redesign promotional materials for the office, including one-page advertising for inclusion in promotional packs, HTML emails, programs, flyers and brochures.
Regularly, I receive an email saying something along the lines of ‘pls redo fancy email send me text i will edit THANKS,’ signifying that several hours of perfectionist tweaking is about to ensue, followed by half an hour of trying to get the thing to print on a badly shared printer that the ‘tech guru’ of the office bought because the guy said it was good and gave him half price on toner cartridges for a year, even ‘though it’s a Solid Ink Phaser.
Then, the fun really starts. After being left on her desk for an hour and a half (just long enough for me to think that she likes it), the boss decides that she doesn’t like the copy that I’ve written that actually makes sense, doesn’t like the design that I’ve worked on for hours, and wants to know ‘why couldn’t you just make it look like the one we used to have but with the new photos and change the number to 40.’
Here is where my dilemma starts. I’ve been given someone else’s design, someone else’s work, someone else’s text, and have been asked to ‘make it look like that one.’ Now, the company owns the design, so there’s no legal issues there, and I don’t even really mind doing it so there’s not even really any ethical issues.
My issue is more one of professional pride – do I want to put my name to something that looks ugly? Do I want to spend my time recreating something that is essentially someone else’s idea, and get paid for it?
In the end, it’s a moot point. I will recreate the document, and make it look good, and tweak the things that I can’t bear to see about it so that it’s what they’ve asked for but still something that I’m not completely distraught about putting my name to. My job is to make the client happy more than to create wonderful designs, that’s just the nature of the beast.
But I don’t have to like it.