Without question our generation adores the Internet.
For good and bad, the Internet has been 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 designers or an artist, the Internet has become a gateway 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 sell our skills to the almighty paying client and create an independent lifestyle free from the corporate shackles that imprisoned our parent’s generation.
And while it all sounds 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 feed us – a backlash against our own clients.
Over the past couple of years, dozens of humour sites, which expose the frustration between a freelancer’s work and their client’s expectations, have been popping up. The tumblr blog Clients From Hell and the twitter account BITCHCO are two examples. While well-established web comics such as BusinessGuysOnBusinessTrips and Freelance Freedom have thrived on the negativity brewing from a generation of workers who feel under-appreciated by older clients and upper management suits.
But in recent months, the backlash towards clients has become poignant and more aggressive.
In May of this year user experience designer Dustin Curtis took aim at the poor design experience at American Airlines’ corporate web site. Through a series of blog posts and comment discussions, a member of AA’s design team was fired. Then in July of this year, 51 of the web’s most influential SEO experts were carbon copied on an ill-advised Request For Proposal, which spiralled into a personal attack on the original sender. Ultimately this entire email chain was posted for the rest of the SEO community to read. Finally, in recent days a post from designer David R. Thorne has been making the rounds of the design/freelance community, which exemplifies the next step in the intensifying backlash. Through a series of quick-witted emails and detailed pie charts, Thorne essentially gave an unrealistic client the proverbial middle finger.
While there was an undeniable amount of humour in Thorne’s response, his usage of 3D pie charts and clip art is commendable; it does shed light on the volatile nature of the client-freelancer relationships.
As someone who makes a living in the web design world, I am not going to deny that this is the single most frustrating aspect of our industry. Not a week goes by where I don’t spend time trying to justify my company’s skill set to a potential client trying to low-ball our best work. It’s an aggravating aspect of our industry, but the above-mentioned sites go a long way in reminding us that we are not alone and it’s okay 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 emails 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 now runs a web-design/social media outfit called 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.
Tags: backlash, freelance, freelancer
