Valhalla Island

I came across this list of client quotes on del.icio.us and ended up spending my entire UI design tutorial browsing through it. It’s a very long list and some of them aren’t as good as others so here’s a few I can really relate to.

“i want our side bar to look exactly like amazon’s. oh, here i am gonna send it to you, just use it…and then maybe make it kinda pastel, i hear that’s the new thing now, to make things look feminine. I want the same font as useit.com uses, that guy really knows what he’s talking about!!”

“can you guys make it more like a power-point presentation, you know, with the sliding text stuff and all?”

“i checked with a friend and they said there definitely IS a rainbow effect in photoshop, why did you tell us there wasn’t one?”

“more fonts. use more fonts!” “ummm… how many do you want?” “how many do you have?”

“Please also put a landlord hat on the landlord.”

In a meeting the client rep told us to “think outside the box” and “make me uncomfortable”. He quit the week before the site launched. Guess we made him too uncomfortable.

Client: “We want a website that can play DVD quality video, but we don’t want to use streaming video and the load time must be zero.” Designer: “That’s impossible. Everything has a load time. DVD quality runs about 100 megs a minute.” Client: “We’ll take our business elsewhere…”

Client: Could you do another 20 Versions? Me: By Tomorrow? Client: Yeah! Me: Erm it’s going to be tight (not to mention look shit). Client: Why’s it going to take so long? All you have to do is put the parameters/varabiles/colours in, the computer will do the rest… He serioulsy thought the computer, renders Logo’s based on permutations I feed it…

I would like to know whether this is the same across all industries? Is it just because people use the internet daily they think they know everything about it? Someone should finance an advertising campaign telling people to treat the design and web professionals like any other.