rinks wrote:Green Gecko wrote:Half the time I do it to find alternative copies of corporate images that they themselves can't tell are terrible compressed versions and I have to find it on the Internet instead, which is hilarious. It's literally faster to do that then to ask for a vector graphic, explain what that is, wait weeks and then get the same file resized to 100x or saved as strawberry floating word document or something.
Ha, I've had similar experiences. Asked a company for versions of their photos that don't have their logo plastered over them (flattened image, naturally). They come back and say they don't have them. I check their website and find exactly what I had asked for. I assume they think I'll just use the logo version, but that's not happening.
Yes, you get it. It's become a routine thing.
I go to their website, oh look some embedded SVG code, I copy and paste the code into a text document, save it with an SVG extension, add it to my platform and send out layouts with their logo neatly and clearly positioned on whatever gooseberry fool they want. Crystal clear actionable visual. It's a simple yes/no/why. Of course they can do this themselves very easily but nobody at any companies seems to know what the strawberry float a corporate graphic design asset even looks like on a computer. They just refer to "the logo" or "the attached" without ever properly understanding what the strawberry float that is.
I'm charging at least £50 for file preparation in 2023, I'm fed up for fixing people's gooseberry fool and asking multiple times over the course of weeks for something resembling the thing they themselves asked for printed on a thing. strawberry floating hell. And of course weeks into this complex and multi-step process to send me the goddamn logo files, send all of them, send the biggest one, I don't care just don't send me a 50 pixel jpg with a white background, then oh we need it tomorrow. Of course.
Then there's the ones where the logo is superimposed in MS Paint on a low res jpg of a t shirt that doesn't even remotely resemble the actual proportions of a real t shirt (but it must look exactly like that despite that shirt NOT BEING REAL). I know what a t shirt looks like. I'm a professional apparel decorator. I need just the logo, on its own, I will do all of that gooseberry fool using actual 40MB layered PSDs from the manufacturer.
Ah just cut the logo out from the t shirt then. But that will look gooseberry fool! It's 100 strawberry floating pixels wide! That's BARELY A strawberry floating INCH.
Oh I see sorry I asked our guy, here's a Dropbox link to a gif, it's a transparent background, hope this works for you. Open the file and it's an old version of the logo from 10 years ago or whatever and is obviously wrong if someone actually opened the goddamn file rather than just reading the file name.
OK so I made some of this stuff up but it happens regularly in any design field working with clients. The worst part is it's some other "designer"'s fault having bad practices and handing over shitty files to gatekeep proper master files like Adobe pdf or eps or corel or illustrator or whatever.
Case in point I have an elegant system on which client can upload their graphics, whatever the strawberry float it is and position it themselves, taking out loads of unnecessary intermediate file creation and sending and checking it's sent and received and approval and blah blah. The system generates all of the paperwork and everything is accessible via simple links.
But no some guy has to ring my doorbell instead and hand over the files on a USB stick that corrupts and dies because they don't do computers.
Or I'll check with the band and get back to you in 30 minutes. 7 hours later yes we can confirm we want the thing we already confirmed we wanted last week but had to confirm it again for no strawberry floating reason, so now I can put the necessary supply orders in and pay for expedited shipping to meet your insane deadline that you sabotaged wasting months doing nothing.
No matter what kind of approach you have or standards or chaperoning or whatever, whether it be via a website or a strawberry floating telegram, you need a full time set of people to engage the reciprocal part of some people's minds, or get them to actually read 50 to 100 words in an email outlined as bullet points.
I'm pivoting to 80% retail on finished items next year with custom stuff for guaranteed non idiots only, not only for the health of the business but for my own strawberry floating sanity. I miss just shipping gooseberry fool and, oh it's done. There's literally nothing else to be done. Wow. Not 10 hours on just email per customer out of 50 customers trying to get someone to make a decision.
I am literally hiring someone to do things like this
Hello did you receive the previous email
Please send the file in this format
OK thank you but could you please send in the specified format
OK thank you for letting us know, if you could confirm by x time please
Unfortunately as we did not receive x thing in y time to fulfil your requested time line we will need to delay. Please send the thing thanks
Hey do you want the thing you asked about recently
Hello this thing you decided to come back to at a future time, it is the future time now, please update
Over and over again forever. If I could do it myself I would but I can't. It's immensely draining.
And yes I have a strawberry floating app/website, everyone emails me anyway because they don't want to do any work and won't pay for it to be done for them.
Enough.
And no I'm not meeting you for coffee to discuss the possibility of possibly maybe doing something and then return to step 1, get stuck there for aeons and then ghost me.
So for all you salaried guys. Yes. This is what work is like and people are hopeless. But you get paid.
I get paid strawberry float all, in fact I SPEND money. You just have to learn how to weed helpless customers out so they don't tank your business and bleed all the good clients dry with half a brain / not sitting in offices not doing their job but who cares we're getting paid lol.
My anxiety gets so bad just looking at emails these days, the pit of temporal productivity doom, where everybody seemingly goes to achieve strawberry float all while pretending they are doing useful and important work. C'mon admit it, it's 90% bullshit.
strawberry float emails man
