Biggest pet peeves in graphic design (both aesthetic and customer) and favorite Samurai Jack episodes from seasons 1-4
The absolute biggest...has to be when I am treated like a tool rather than a skilled, award winning professional.
It’s not even a pet peeve to me. I feel outright insulted and I’ve let more than a couple clients know where I draw the line on that shit. They came to us because they can’t do this shit themselves, and they sure as hell aren’t going to make a killer ad or logo in fucking MS Paint. So if they try to take my hard work and warp it into some hideous abortion of a project, which I’ve had happen before, we flat out tell them no. We will not have our reputation tainted by producing bitchin’ logos that get torn apart by a committee of 12 geriatrics who wouldn’t know color theory if I beat the shit out of them with a book about it.
We do great business without advertising ourselves, so losing a bad client is nothing to us. Some would get pissy with us about “giving the customer what they want” so we just forward them to some cheap ass site that does bad clipart logos for the price of a burger and tell them to have fun. You want your entertainment district logo to feature musical instruments, drinks, numerous people, use 12 different Pantone colors, and have a sponsor logo shoved into it? What’s that, your board of directors has rejected the 8th version so far where we made exactly the revisions they just asked for?
Project terminated. Account closed. We will invoice and mail you a hard copy for billable hours. We’ve moved more away from client work and are working on producing our own stuff and only doing branding projects and things we like with less tolerance for bullshit. Got tired of seeing our work beat to death and then displayed in public.
As for aesthetics, I try not to be too negative about things even if I don’t like them. But sometimes you can see art that doesn’t “work.” Graphic design is fundamentally the arrangement of elements. And if that particular arrangement doesn’t “speak” clearly, it can be confusing and ugly. Too much info, too little, crammed together or too spread out. Too many elements, too few. It varies from piece to piece but within the piece it all needs to jive. Sometimes less is more, but sometimes going buck wild works. If I had to pick a biggest pet peeve tho, I’d say it’s design work that looks clever but is actually poorly implemented. Wow, overlaid two different text layers at different capacities and colors to make a letterpress effect? Neat. But I can’t read a goddamn thing with it all being the same font size and weight. Stuff like that.
Do not ask me to pick a favorite episode. What I love most about Samurai Jack is how they would sometimes break the main storyline up with filler to show off their style or just do something far out. The white/black negative and positive space of Jack vs. the Ninja. The “not fly, JUMP GOOD!” episode. The episodes with no dialogue. It’s the only show I ever woke up on a Saturday morning and made damned sure I saw.
