The pain of client work
Published 12 February 2007
Hi! You've stumbled upon a blog post by a guy named Ryan. I'm not that guy anymore, but I've left his posts around because cool URIs don't change and to remind me how much I've learned and grown over time.
Ryan was a well-meaning but naïve and priviledged person. His views don't necessarily represent the views of anyone.
For the most part, working for a design firm is a joy. New projects are varied, and new problems emerge with each. You meet and worth with myriad people. One client brought each person in our office a dozen eggs from her farm. Another took us for beers when we deployed his site.
The worst part of client work (aside from getting it, perhaps) is letting it go.
I've been working on my graduate portfolio over the past week, and have been noticing how much client work tends to change—usually not for the better—after you let it go.
Alma College hired me in due to the role I played in the re-design of their site. After a committee had decided upon the information architecture, much of the colors and graphics were my ideas. I also created their bullet-proof stylesheet and semantic markup.
Unfortunately, I also left in the middle of a re-branding campaign. They changed the logo, and--to my chagrin--the layout and color scheme of their site.
Regardless of whether or not it's more attractive or works better for them, it's no long mine, and that realization hurt. Also, I was too naïve to take screenshots (a mistake I won't duplicate) and spent several hours replicating the old look from salvaged production files, screenshots, and a liberal dose of Photoshop.