A website I found the other day, Clients From Hell, has taken upon themselves the monstrous job of collecting and categorizing records of some of the worst.

Below are a few of my favorites from their site, although I had to stop reading after a little while as the craziness was starting to get me in a bad mood.

Enjoy! (sort of):

RENOVATING DESIGN:

I had been working with a client since Feburary creating a full identity package. After countless teeth pulling sessions and geting the greens “just right” we were ready to print in September. I get a call from her saying “I put a stop payment on my cheque because we want to get some renovations done on the house”.

TESTY TESTER:

After developing a custom e-commerce site we received an irate phone call from the client on the day of the launch…

“We’ve been hacked!” he shouted down the phone, “How could you let this happen?”

“Why do you think you’ve been hacked?”

“There’s an order right here and no payment!”

“Who’s the customer?”

“It says ‘Mr Testy Tester, 1 Test Street, Testville’… It’s clearly a hoax order!”

“Do you think we might have been testing the site?”

“Oh, I see…”

GOOGLES:

CLIENT: “Make sure you tell the Googles of the world that the site will be launching soon so it places high in their results.”

I have a feeling I am going to be borrowing this next guys line sometime in the near future:

Prospective client: $400 for a logo?! Why are you so expensive? My nephew has Photoshop—I can just get him to do it.
Me: Does your nephew have Microsoft Word?
Prospective client: Yes.
Me: Then have him write you a novel while he’s at it.

This is an inherently ignorant question.

First of all, it’s dumb because (like most internet based logo design firms) our logo design prices range from $100-$700, we cater to small businesses and startups looking to save a few bucks, and no “large corporation” is going to be price shopping for a buget logo on the internet.

Secondly, most large corporations (although admittedly not all) tend to hire a very high end design firm (or develop an in-house one) that handles all company branding and advertising of any kind, including product design and branding, which is something my company does not do.

Finally, why should it matter? As Seth Godin points out in an excellent blog post, the only reason that companies like Nike, Apple, and Starbucks have such powerful logos is not because some logo design firm did an incredible job on the logo (I’m not saying that they are bad logos in any way, just that they are not THAT incredible on their own), but because of the massive amount of branding energy and advertising invested by those companies, as well as some very sucessful marketing plans.

So in short, if my company DID develop a logo that ended up being nationally recognized, it would not necessarily reflect our skill as designers, but rather the ability of the company owning the brand to promote it on a large scale.

However, I do have to admit, in the name of honesty, that if my company HAD developed the Nike logo, I would without a doubt be proclaiming it from the rooftops and preaching it in the streets, regardless of any of the above.