10 Ways To Annoy A Graphic Designer

May 5, 2016 by Suraj Kashyap

Being a graphic designer, you might have some complaints about your clients. This is two-way (graphic designer and a client) process and affords some frustrating situations for designers. Clients do plenty of things that leave designers justifiably annoyed. So here are the 10 most common things that drive a graphic designer mad.

1) Compare us with other Graphic Designers

Note that we all speak the same language but we all don’t have the same accent. Likewise, you may find graphic designers but not all the same. You may find designers who charge $5 per logo on the internet and also graphic designing professionals who charge as much as $500 for designing a logo. So, know that comparing with others does not give you the best unique creative design you are looking for.

2) Asking us to Make Logo bigger

We hate hearing the line “Make the logo bigger”, big isn’t always better. This phrase has become a bit of a cliché, and a running joke amongst designers. Writing a phone number massive, doesn’t mean everyone who can read the number will actually call the number.

3) Send low-resolution Images in MS Word

Seeing MS Word file attachments in our e-mails makes us want to pull our hair out. Know that sending images in MS Word doesn’t make it a photo album. Graphic designers are always asked to scale the images and its hard to stretch a low-res file without sacrificing its sharpness and quality.

4) Ask us to edit Flattened File

Although it is possible on some levels, that we can edit your flattened files but there is a limit. Make sure you send us editable layers and original files. Final artwork from us is usually saved to PDF. Most of these aren’t editable, but some of them are. Note that .jpg and .png files are non-editable.

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5) Ask us to work for Free & tell us that it’s Good for our Portfolio

We want you to get your money’s worth but we can’t do it by sacrificing our cost of living. A graphic designer like it when they find out that it would be good for their portfolios. Everyone should be paid for the work they do, even the graphic designers.

6) Haggle Endlessly

Haggling may be considered when the project starts. But at the end of the day “you get what you pay for”. You choose to use us because you like our work and work with us, we are in a creative market, not a fish market where you get the stale fish at a discounted price.

7) Take Feedbacks from non-authorities

Go ahead and show our work to your friend/spouse/child, but don’t rely on their feedback unless they are adept with marketing or graphic design. Business colleagues, advertising manager or anyone with authority would be better placed to provide input and will have some marketing experience.

8) Take too much of time for revisions

Before we start our project we laid out a timetable to gauge the time.It can be followed if we get your feedback for revisions properly in time, you may not have a particular deadline to complete the work but we like to finish the projects on time so that we can get paid on time.

9) Expect unlimited revisions

You should know that there will be a limit that we can revise our work based on brief you have given us. Continually asking for alterations to your original brief whilst not willing to pay for it is going to cause some problems.We would have quoted for the job and estimated that how long it would take with a built in contingency for revisions.

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10) Provide Vague Instructions

Jazz it up a bit? Make it more stylish? Can you make it pop? Can you make it more web-ish? It lacks Sparkle. There is no oomph! Please try to be more specific because vague instructions may lead to vague revisions.

As a Graphic designer, what else drives you mad and that isn’t in the list above? Share them with us in the comments below! Share this article with your fellow designers and show some support for the plight of graphic designers!