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Hey, there, stranger! Boy, you wouldn’t believe the day I just had at work. I work at a web agency, you see. Yeah, I’m the designer. And depending on who you ask, I have the good or bad fortune of being the only one there in a sea of programmers. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. Today was one of those days when our clients decided to have the most moronic, unpractical revisions. And not just one client. Three of them! In the same day!
I bet you get days like that sometimes, no? Days when client stupidity seems to flow like the damn Nile, for Pete’s sake. And the worse part is that they won’t listen to reason, either. It’s what they want and you have to push those pixels, ’cause, hey, we all have to eat and pay our bills, right?

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Enough lamenting, though. Here’s the deal: we’re designers. We do work for clients. So, then, why is it that the vast majority of us, myself included, feel like we have to amputate one of our own limbs when clients ask for revisions that we think are unreasonable? It’s their product and it’s their own doing. And, usually, client revisions, are focused on a few specific areas of the design, not the whole thing, so it’s not like we’re just puppets with a graphics tablet. And even if that were the case, we still get paid for all that initial, pre-revisioned, work.

This got me thinking. Ok, I’ll admit it, it got me introspecting. Because I did, actually, have one of those days today and even after all these years of designing for clients, I still get just as frustrated about this stuff. Could it be … ? Could I be designing not for the client, but for myself? But why would I do that?! I never play any other role in my client work, other than designer, so there’s no extra interest. Is there some sort of emotional attachment between my work and myself? If so, why?

The more I think about it, the more I can’t avoid the obvious conclusion that this is the kind of attitude that an artist has towards his/her work. Which is a bit frightening, really, because I, genuinely, believe that designers are not artists. I guess it’s time to reconsider this premise.

But, perhaps, we’re something different. Perhaps we are not, in fact, artists of any kind. Maybe it’s just our own selfish, self aggrandizing personalities at play here and we care about our work simply because it’s ours, with no real emotional connection, such as an artist would have.

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What about you? Do you Hulk-out when a client demands unreasonable revisions? Are you an artist or an egomaniac? Or maybe there’s a third option here, as yet unexplored.

What say you, designer?