By Connor Turner
For good and bad, the Internet has become a major player in our lives. It has shaped our relationships and changed how we interact with our community. For those of us who have chosen a career path as a freelancer, a designer, a photographer or an artist, the Internet has become a way to forge a career by our own rules. It has allowed us to showcase our knowledge through blogs and promote our artistic merit through online portfolios. All in an attempt to find paying clientele and create an independent lifestyle free from the corporate shackles that imprisoned our previous generation.
And while it all may sound like roses, something ugly is rearing its head around the online “water coolers” of the freelance community. An intense backlash has formed against the hands that allow us this freedom – a backlash against our own clients.
In the past year, dozens of humour sites have cropped up, exposing the frustration between a freelancer’s work and their client’s expectations. The web site Clients From Hell and the twitter account BITCHCO are two popular examples. Well-established web comics like BusinessGuysOnBusinessTrips and Freelance Freedom have thrived on the negativity brewing from a group of workers who feel underappreciated by older clients and upper management.
But in recent months, the backlash towards clients has become poignant and more aggressive. The freelance community is making it known how much it dislikes low levels of appreciation from ill-informed clients.
In May of 2009, user experience designer Dustin Curtis took aim at the poor design experience at American Airlines’ corporate website. Through a series of blog posts and comment discussions, a member of American Airlines’ design team was eventually fired. Then in July of the same year, 51 of the web’s most influential search engine optimization (SEO) experts were carbon copied (rather than blind carbon copied) on an ill-advised Request for Proposal, which spiralled into a personal attack on the original sender by the SEO community. Ultimately this entire email chain was posted for the rest of the freelance community to read. Finally, in the closing days of 2009, designer David R. Thorne essentially gave an unrealistic client the proverbial middle finger through a series of quick-witted emails and detailed pie charts.
While there was an undeniable amount of humour in Thorne’s response, his usage of 3-D pie charts and clip art is commendable; it does shed light on the volatile nature of the client-freelancer relationship and the appeal of these sites. As Julie Vincent, a photographer and independent mortgage broker noted, “Freelancers look for stories that are similar to ours as confirmation that we’re not alone in having the occasional frustrating client. Those sites are also great sources of how not to be a client.”
What is fuelling the divide? While the Internet has allowed creatives to find their own way, the freedom it provides has made this backlash inevitable.
The tools that many freelancers use are now readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. Anyone can start a website at blogger.com or venture into the world of professional photography with Adobe Photoshop. After all, if one can start a blog in five minutes, building an e-commerce website must be equally easy.
The availability of these tools has, in turn, reduced the degree of separation between these industries and your everyday citizen. Whether it is your neighbour’s son or your best friend’s roommate, everyone is connected to someone who dabbles in the industry in some form.
Lastly, the perceived level of “magic” associated with most freelance industries has diminished. A quick Google search on search engine optimization may suggest the discipline is rather basic and rudimentary but the actual process is complex and overwhelming.
The availability of information provided by the Internet has diluted the value of a freelancer’s work and also removed the shroud of mystery for many industries.
When it is all said and done, the client relationship is always going to be a cornerstone of the freelance career path. Outlandish requests and misguided clients will be a continuous aspect of the lifestyle, but the above-mentioned sites go a long way in reminding freelancers that we are not alone and it is ok to laugh. But what is the next step in this relationship? What action by some scorned designer or writer will triumph Thorne’s genius pie charts? As more posts and sites of this nature appear, at what point will email chains like the ill-advised SEO proposal become commonplace around our online water coolers? And how many more comic strips can be filled with client horror stories?
I don’t have answers to these questions, but my gut tells me that we’ll be seeing a few more examples of this backlash before it gets quieter.
After cutting his teeth in the oil & gas Industry, Connor Turner is the owner/operator of web-design/social media outfit Armadillo Studios Inc. He’s active in the Calgary design and web community, helping to launch the yycPhotobook and blogging about local companies at c.t.overdrive.ca. He’s warming up to Helvetica, but they’re still not BFF’s.
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I think what designers fail to realize is that clients gain a misguided perception of what is possible because we don’t want to disappoint. The initial meetings are always about pleasing the client, a lot of ‘yes, we can do that’, and ‘absolutely whatever you want, I’ll take care of it’, to ‘you are going to love this artwork/product design etc etc’ is thrown about in hopes to secure the contract. I mean to be quite honest, a designer goes from sales person, to designer, to account manager depending on the stage of each project. The unfortunate side effect is that designers don’t necessarily know how to ask the right questions in the beginning, and possibly say no to their next paycheck if the client turns out to be an unrealistic quack. I think more often than not, it boils down to educating your clients, telling them realistically what is possible and what is not. I always chalk my freelance misadventures to my inability to communicate the full needs of what the client wants in the beginning. One freelancer I know tells potential clients EVERYTHING they don’t want to hear right in the beginning and then if they still stick around, then it was a match made in heaven.
I think if creative individuals wants to bridge that gap, they need to focus their energy on educating their clients and knowing where to find the right words instead of spending a large majority of their day bitching and complaining to the online community about how they’ve failed the industry as a whole.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a creative freelancer, and I’ve fucked up my share of relationships before, telling the client where to stick it and ultimately feeling great that I ’stuck up’ for my core beliefs. However, as time passed I realized, that had I communicated in the beginning what really needed to be said, or walked away from the opportunity as soon as I saw the inevitable red flags instead of focusing on the end result, money, maybe I wouldn’t have had to put my reputation on the line, just to be right.
As Jef Richards says; “While it may be true that the best advertising is word-of-mouth, never lose sight of the fact it also can be the worst advertising.