Favorite "professional" graphic design idiot stories?

[jochwat]

I worked for three different Nancys. Two out of three of them were absolutely awful. One was great! If any of you Nancys are reading this, figure out which one of you was the great one.

So I worked for an on-site graphics department as a designer, for a large corporate entity. There was some confusion regarding, well, what do you know -- file formats. So much confusion that we all gathered around a speakerphone for a meeting to resolve it. Now, I was pretty new here, and for some reason, Nancy and I were not on the best of terms. But she knew I knew things so I was in the meeting. The client (from the speakerphone) starts to explain that they want to provide the proper files to us, but they are exporting them from Autocad. They also have some graphics in Word that they need to use. I recall the conversation something like this:

Fred, the Client (from Phone): So is there a format you prefer that we may be able to export from Autocad?

Nancy: Joe, can you answer that one?

Joe (that's me): Yes, I'm pretty sure you can export an .EPS file and it would retain the information we need.

Fred: Great! Now what about the Word files?

Nancy: I believe that if you just rename a Word file from .doc to whatever extension you need it to be, it will convert it, so you can just rename the file FILE.DOC to FILE.AI and it will convert, right?

Joe: (tersely, without any hesitation): NO. Anyway, Fred, just send the Word file and we'll get what we need.

Fred: Awesome, thanks! I think that covers it!

Nancy: (glowering)

Not sure if it comes across as hilarious as it did in person. Maybe you had to be there... and had to be me... and know Nancy.

 

[jtiii]

But she knew I knew things so I was in the meeting.

Reminds me of The Expert, where marketing and creative tell Anderson they need him to give them "seven red lines, all of them strictly perpendicular"

 

[gnubler]

Classic! Thanks for posting. I didn't watch the whole video but it reminds me of a lot of my customers.
Sometimes I have no idea what they're trying to explain so I just ask them to stop talking and send me a picture.

The Asian guy's deer in the headlight look is probably how I look when I get those quizzical requests.

 

[Humble PM]

Watch to the end, then go get the whiskey.
And weep, as your soul asks to get kicked out the door.

 

[MrDav3C]

Gotta love the standard logo problems of designers providing a supposedly a vector based logo that's actually just a bitmap in a container file which to be honest, we probably should all be pretty used to by now!

Sometimes we provide marketing departments with a vehicle template as they want to do their own artwork. & I have one like this booked in for next week.

Firstly they send over an "approved" concept visual and I have to tell them this isn't the right vehicle and will look different once it's on the correct template.

Then we finally got "proper artwork" today, however they either still haven't used my template or they have removed the driver's door lock, as well as the side loading door incl handle and then positioned logos and strap lines right over these things.

After a closer inspection of the file the social media logos are a low Res bitmap and after reading their email, some elements of the artwork that are light grey need to be black, however there are other grey items and I've still had no response as to what colour they are supposed to be!