I Don’t Care if Your Mother Likes the Design …
… I think it sucks!
That was a snippet from a conversation Toni had today with a graphic designer in Canada.
It all started a month ago when we decided to employ a graphic designer here in Hervey Bay to design the header for a website Toni is building. It was going to be a major ongoing project so we decided to get a professional design done.
You can read about our attempts to get a local designer to produce something more than hot air here, here and here
When we finally gave up on the local people we made do with something I cobbled together while we looked around for someone else. Last week we remembered that someone in Canada had done some good work for us a year or so ago so Toni contacted them.
She outlined the project, gave an image to the artist that she wanted included in the header and extended the job to include background and buttons. The result came back today and was terrible. It was ugly, the background swallowed the foreground and every page was going to require the text to appear in white.
When Toni said that it was nothing like what she wanted she was met with the response:
“Well my mother and aunt liked it.” along with the inference that if they liked all women would like it.
I wonder how many small businesses survive with an attitude like that?
Edit
They say a picture is worth a thousand words so here is a screenshot of the design we were presented with. To be fair to the designer the green in the centre of the page is a banner we are currently running on the site.
August 10th, 2006 at 7:08 am
[...] Well at long last the hassles we have been having with the design of a website Toni wants to launch have come to an end. You can find the path to what I’ve written about it in Part 1 of this post. [...]