This week i've decided to give you all a laugh and feature some of the funniest, and sometimes unbelievable world of, Clients From Hell stories...be warned, some people know nothing about business or computers. Continue Reading...
As you probably gathered from the preview image above, this article is featuring some of the best/worst client requests of the past year from a site named nothing more than, Clients From Hell.
We decided to do this because quite simple it’s a favourite of ours, which should soon show up in the footer links section, so site back and enjoy!
“We are in the process of creating a Facebook application called “ShitListr” this allows you to virtually add people to your shit list. We are looking to have the logo redone and potentially have the whole application interface built by you guys, but I would currently only be interested in seeing how the logo turns out first.”
“I want the cover to be a black SUV driving through a field of flowers towards a mountain with a fishing pole sticking out the back window… oh and the sky needs to be tie-died.”
Initial email from a client:
“I’m working with a web developer to build a website. The purpose of this website is to calculate certain outputs based on very specific inputs. This website will be, and currently is, private (access given by administrator). It will not have a large audience, nor is there potential for a large audience (potentially 100, maybe a few hundred but probably not more than 1,000). The developer has built the back-end and created a simple front-end GUI; however, because this is going to be used by, albeit, a small audience, it should have a friendly and simple to understand design, GUI and user experience. The total number of pages currently included in the front-end website is 19.”
When asked to elaborate:
“The website is an elaborate calculator. Those given access, sign in, are taken to a home page, click on a specific sub-page and are then taken to a front-end GUI that calculates an output. If you would be so inclined, and before getting too specific, I would need to send you an NDA for execution by someone eligible to sign the document at xxxxxxx.”
“You came to see me yesterday and I don’t see any sign of my new website going live yet? What’s going on?”
Another entertaining first-contact with a no-go project proposal…
“I wanted a theme for a blog that I would need. I need the blog to be very tacky, very web2.0-ish. I need in similar layout (layout, not colors and style) like http://psdtuts.com/ I am willing to pay $150 for this.
But I will need a lot of designing since this is a blog which will be hooked on to several other things. If you want to help me out, you will get 15% of what I make, here is my business plan. I am already working in the field and I have 2 years of experience, as well as idea regarding business planning, hosting, wordpress diagnostics, marketing. All I need is a developer.. Again, here’s the plan. User gen. Review website The mini pitch: ‘You write, we pay’ “
“The email newsletter design that you showed us is not fun enough. Can you be innovative and make it interesting by adding some Flash animations?”
“I had a client review a design, and all the textarea’s were filled with ‘Lorem Ipsum’. Reply: It looks good, but we don’t understand it.”
Me: “What don’t you understand?”
Reply: “The text. What language is that anyway?”
Me: “It doesn’t mean anything, it’s to fill up the textareas. Just focus on the design, not the content.”
Reply, after a day or two: “Could you please type the text from our brochure in there, we can’t review the site in a foreign language.”
“That chart about the different kinds of radiation makes the radiation seem too scary. Can you make it look friendlier?”
These were the days of the Netscape navigator.
We prepared a photoshopped design proposal for the upcoming brand-new website of a corporation: Black text on white pages, with headlines and links using the corporate design colors.
The CEO replied: “You guys are amateurs! Swindlers! I showed this to my son, he knows HTML. This isn’t possible! Everybody knows that in Netscape, pages are gray, links are blue and visited links are purple.”
CLIENT: “Make sure you tell the Googles of the world that the site will be launching soon so it places high in their results.”
Client: “We like the design, but could you make the blues all the same.”
Me: “It’s the same blue through out the design.”
Client: “It looks like different blues.”
Me: “That’s because colors are perceived differently dependent on neighboring colors.”
Client: “That’s stupid.”
“I understand that you prefer to use photoshop, but we don’t feel like that program is universal enough. If you could do all of the design work in Microsoft Paint it would be easier for us to edit what you do and give you an idea of the changes we want.”
“I want the design to look like 5 people standing outside a theater, having a conversation after a movie, waiting to be picked up by a car… dipped in gold.!”
Client: I have two logos I want you to develop for me. What’s your rate?
Me: “Great! My rate is $250 per logo. But I understand you’re just starting up and I would be able to cut you a deal if that’s out of your range.”
Client: “What’s ‘a deal’ ?”
Me: “How about $200 for both logos?”
Client: “I can’t really afford that. What if I gave you $50, and mowed your lawn?”
“We really don’t like web as a medium. Can you please force our sites visitors to print out a copy of every page? We want our page to be more tangible.”
Client: “Our site has been hacked! There are little orange boxes on it!”
Me: “Yes, those indicate RSS feeds. You’ll see them on all major sites.”
Client: “Well, we should remove them, they look like hacking.”
“I want it that whenever someone visits our website it automatically installs an icon with a picture of a dog on their desktop. The dog should walk around the screen.”
“All these drawings about dinosaurs… Why can’t we have photos?”
“Can you show Joanne [client’s secretary] how you designed our business cards. I don’t want to pay you for doing them.”
“I want my website to look exactly like yours. That would be perfect. Except I want my own logo—exactly like this company’s.”
“I dont care if it loses 90% of visitors, we cant have a skip on the website intro, we paid a lot of money for that and everybody has to see it.”
If you enjoyed this little post then be sure to check back often or subscribe to our RSS Feed for future updates on our content. Maybe if enough people like it I’ll do another one in time to come. Comment, rate and subscribe…Ohh wait…Comment and subscribe!
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Firefox is one of the most popular browsers in the world. The secret behind this popularity is thousands of small apps available with firefox which is also free.
With all the modern browsers starting to support CSS3 (including Mozilla Firefox 4, Apple Safari 4, Internet Explorer 9), it’s time to take a real look at CSS3 and see what it can do, and what it’s capable of doing. CSS3 has a lot of new properties to use, including gradients, border images, transitions, animations, border radius, @font-face, shadows, and more.
Since HTML5 has been in development, there has been a lot of speculation that the introduction of mixed with JavaScript means flash will have no place on the internet. I’ve taken some time to have a look at what developers have created using a combination of the JavaScript and , and it is starting to look rather impressive.
Today we are showcasing “Best of the Web”. We have scoured the internet in search of other design driven blogs and websites to showcase what they have to offer for the month of June, 2010. There is plenty of great stuff out there such as tutorials, freebies, resources and lots of inspirational pieces. I am confident that your designs will benefit from these hot new finds.
Today’s web treat is a free combo pack of large, high resolution (2400px * 1600px) Hot Pink Industrial Grunge Textures in .jpg format.
As we mentioned before, logos are a very important part of building your brand’s identity. “Branding” yourself, is the best way to represent who you are and what you are all about. If designed properly, logos can have an enormous impact on your company’s success.
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36 Comments
#15 was my first post to CFH, thanks for choosing it.
Some of these are just epic. I’ve personally had cases of no.4 and 19. Good times, good times.
This article would be 100 times better if not for the little “titles” (the main author’s comments) sprinkled on each of the 20 posts. These posts are all funny on their own, and we don’t need you explaining to us what the joke is. In most of these, it merely ruins the punchline before we get to read it. (You should consider changing #18′s title to the following: “Dinosaurs are now extinct, and they died millions of years before the camera was invented. This is why they haven’t been and never will be photographed. The person who made this request sure is a knucklehead! Oh well. Anyway, here is this post about dinosaurs being photographed. I hope you enjoy!”)
The last comment to this is almost as funny as the posts themselves,- Adam, are you SURE you weren’t the client in #15??
Absolute hilarity and thanks for posting it. WITH titles!
Spreading the word to everyone.
I know what you mean, it gave me a good laugh aswell
I like to think that second comment was clever sarcasm.
Hilarious list, thanks for sharing!
Nice! Very Nice! I think at some point I have encountered almost all of these, even the bonus one.
Why can’t clients just admit that they don’t know what they are doing, that’s why they hired us, and let us do our jobs. Are there any other fields where clients do this? Designers need to stand up as a group and say,
“WE ARE NOT YOUR MOUSE CURSOR! THAT IS NOT OUR PURPOSE!”
#11 was, and remains, my favorite.
Too funny!!! I laughed so hard and had to spread this around the company’s e-mail list despite incurring on the risk of people knowing I was not working
these were both hilarious and scary at the same time… i think i may work with one or two of them
I dont feel too well.
Always funny to read client reactions.
You all should also read this one… hilarious.
http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html
Thanks for sharing, it is very nice Top 20
10.) The..Ummm…Googles?
It is a good thing they did not ask that the site should be found by “Googles” before launching it!
this is great thanks for sharing this
Right now, I’m facing my worst client from hell, this post has made me feel much lighter about what I’m going through.
Now I know there are worse ones out there….
Haha. Funny article. You make my day
Hilarious collection…quite hard to pick a favorite.
I especially like the mowed lawn as payment method as well as the bonus…”we paid a lot of money for this intro, everybody has to see it…”
#13 is hilarious. I can imagine your face when you read/heard that coming from the client. Classic!
#11: hehehehe
The whole list made me smile for almost an hour
Oh man, I just had #7 happen to me. But it was “I looked at the two pages. The index page appears to have text in German.”
lol, nice article, thanks
#12 is my submission to clients from hell. I’ve had several horror stories, but that is my favorite story to tell. The fact that it made top 20 is just a bonus!
Thanks!
#18 rules!
But the best one has got to be the one where the client asked “how can people know if they’re a man, a woman or a magazine”.
#12 made me laugh so hard I almost sprayed coffee all over my desk. Then I reached #17 and couldn’t hold it anymore *throws coffee-stained papers to the trash*
My stomach hurts from laughing. These are hilarious, and I’ve dealt with clients like this in the past!
What a great read for a Sunday afternoon! It’s hard to think how little some people know!
incredible! that there are even people out there like this and they work in companies and get paid for a living… I can so relate
I actually agree with Adam. The added titles are stupid and ruin the punchline of many of the anecdotes.
Furthermore, “KayRose” Is highly unprofessional to mock the user who complained. It’s one thing for someone else to say he disagrees or whatever, but for her to say it “gave her a laugh” is truly demeaning and unprofessional. She ends up sounding like the irritating and unfair clients in the anecdotes, rather than like one of us.
What is with the grumpy comments on this? These are funny, who cares about the titles or about what so and so said to so and so, sheesh.
In Persian, we have a proverb that:
“خدا نصیب گرگ بیابان نکنه”
“The God, not fate even to the desert wolf.” (translation not aquirate 100%)
But, don’t forget that we was like them oneday.
:d
it was very interesting to read.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
[...] our first round-up of Clients From Hell quotes got really popular, we simply decided to make another one. As you will [...]
they won’t do that… they’re “GURUs” in their own right ya’ know…