Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

Last week I came across this priceless article, in which the author states that, “The more time that is spent dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing a design by the wrong kinds of people the worse that design gets. The same trend applies to the number of people involved in the design process.” And then he goes on to illustrate these points with some awesome graphs. ;o) Let me go on record by saying that this is SO TRUE.

Earlier this week I was showing a friend a logo I worked on a couple of years ago. The company in question had made a horrible logo themselves (I think they used the WordArt feature of Microsoft Word … blech!) and they needed it to be “more professional.” Even though the logo itself was horrific, the concept they had devised was an interesting one, and I thought it would be no problem to translate it into a clean, modern design.

I presented them a couple of options that I thought were awesome (of course, right?). They brought their “team” in to evaluate them (a team of engineers and scientists at the top of the company, not folks that have any clue about design). They decided that they needed to see more concepts, and so gave me about 10 relatively shoddy logos they found elsewhere that they wanted me to basically copy, but with their name and such. Ugh.

I did this for them, but then they decided that they wanted to have a more “simple” font, and a more “simple” mark. Ok, back to the drawing board. I came up with a lot of really boring logos (I know … I handled myself all wrong, but it was a couple of years ago!) and they of course chose the most boring one of the group, and then told me in detail how they wanted it slightly altered to make it even more boring.

Next came colors. They didn’t want any blues or greens (the colors of life … they were a biology company), but instead wanted red and black (the colors of death?).

In the end, after a lot of torture and very little money, I quit. They ended up basically creating the logo themselves, picking up where we had left off. It was in an ugly font done in all caps, the text was in only one color (a horrible sort of not-so-hot pinkish red) with no spaces (even though the company name is two words), and they had a very common character that you can find on a typewriter (a greater-than carat, in fact) right after the letters done in a yucky, clashing green. To top it all off, the edges aren’t even crisp, but instead fuzzy … it’s clear that they don’t know their way around Illustrator.

Wow, that was a horrible experience. It was funny though, after having two years to cool off, looking through the logo comps, which started off so promising and got so progressively worse, until only utter rubbish remained. I want so desperately to post them all here, but I’m not sure what the legalities of that are. This was one of the worst clients I ever had, and I certainly don’t want to bring their wrath on me. I guess you all can imagine for yourselves …

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 11:12 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.