I recently actually just had to walk away from a marketing internship for a rather sad reason.
Not exactly the way I wanted to end 2014 and start off the new year, but sometimes you just have to know just when to fire your client rather than the other way around.
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| Rough Representation of Concept that the company thought was a good idea if all blue. |
The client company didn't know what they want, yet wanted to be a strong believable Marketing presence. There was another college intern who just put "pretty things together", and then there was me, building and pitching an iconic brand, much as I've had in the recent years.
They didn't like the "simple designs", that I brought with me to the table, and especially with my recent years of work and experience, and when compared my pitch to that of the iconic FedEx logo, which this logo also included a hidden arrow concept as well.. one of the company members actually said the following: "Well no one ever mentions or sees that in the logo (for FedEx), and I don't think really anybody even knows about it."
Wait.. what?
I had to sit back for a second to actually try to process what was just said. Just shaking my head in disbelief all the while with the little designer voice in my head screaming; "How in the hell could someone miss the arrow after looking at the logo on trucks and billboards and packaging for YEARS..?"
After a moment all I could really… well to which I had to professionally respond: "Well.. that logo and arrow concept that you are referring to with FedEx actually won quite a few awards for the way it was designed, and yet its purpose was so clever and so simple."
Once I sat down with the CEO and they honest said we want to start offering logos for $50 and you can't take more than an hour to work on them otherwise we cannot offer you a position here.. is when I just knew they weren't serious about their brand and were only about cutthroat profit.
It was a disaster. The many conversations were just juvenile and not detailed, broken english, etc. Im not sure how they think they could do 90% of the stuff that they wanted to do. And to make it happen in a week nonetheless.. the week of Christmas and New Years that is. As The rabbit hole grew worse and worse, well, nobody has to show you to the door. With major spelling errors with projects they gave and massive failures of communication, its just another designer story to not repeat in the future.
It wasn't $50 an hr btw.. they meant $50.. per logo. How could one possibly even recover from creative burnout under those conditions, let alone be effective in their design?
Moral of the story: Never feel bad about walking away from a nightmare client and/or project.
Just make sure that if you did sign anything contractually that you are covered and thats that.
