Every once in a while you come across this kind of clients that you love working with them. You caught the wave very quickly, it is not difficult for you to interpret the guidelines of the brand, it is light blood, you get along very well with it and to top it off, it loves everything you design for it. So this time you are about to do what we could call it in advance the perfect job. He asks you for an ad, you play around with the typography and even the words fit together perfectly.
You finish quickly, you don’t even bother to make an alternate proposal because there is no way you can beat yourself. You are even good because it will be one of those few times that they do not ask you for corrections, if anything a comma or fix the contact email. You send it and the first thing you receive is a “I love” surrounded by smilies with red hearts. You are already on the other side, you just have to wait for the approval manager of the brand and it will be the best money earned so far this year.
—There is only a small change— the client tells you. You have to change the copy and fix the phones because they are wrong. You already do it without that undefeated flavor that you rarely have the opportunity to savor. At 6:00 in the afternoon he asks you for one more correction because tomorrow he presents it very early. The next day you receive the call at 10 in the morning. You have to change the format, the image and the copy (Yes again).
It is practically a very different design than what you did yesterday. For two in the afternoon you still can’t go out because they keep asking you for changes. Already in the food he calls you that the changes are urgent so that he is released. You convince yourself that the changes do not happen today because the announcement is valid and it is simply not an option that comes out later. Sure enough, he can’t come out afterwards, so you stay in the office to accompany the security guard while you receive new eyedropper corrections – Upload here – drop the name – add a script to the phone – correct the background tone – now make an adaptation— because it will be published in another medium.
You send corrections and between each bounce you check Facebook, you get into Instagram, you run out of your phone battery, hallucinate your computer monitor and even late-night pizza tastes like failure. “That won’t happen to me again”, you think while valuing yesterday I was able to have dinner at your house watching television.
You may be interested: The world of corrections.
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It seems like a lie, but the more you identify with this story the sadder you get. In your mind you rummage through all the possible scenarios so that it does not happen again, but it seems that the more you hate it, the more it happens to you. You talk about it with your friends and you realize that there is no way to avoid it. The reason? Will it be your client? The scale of approvals to which the work must be submitted? Is the brand cursed since it was born? The truth is it is the design itself.
Think about it a little, you will see that it happens even with your same jobs. Who does not design something for ourselves and we must print over and over again because every time we have the sheet in our hands we find something? When we make a PDF, and we open it, the anger invades us because we will have to repeat it for that image that was not aligned, for the kerning or because the background was so dark that you can’t see it.
Should we get used to these processes over and over again? Will it be the cross that we will have to carry until we retire? I would like to say no, but the truth is that once you see it published you fall in love, you presume it, and not to change, you find things that you could have improved. The design never endsAlthough the experience makes you fine and you make better decisions from the initial proposal, we only have to wait for the final authorization signature, sooner or later it always arrives, or that you are promoted to art director and then someone else takes the scrubs . Design at last. Corrected and authorized.
