It's not very often that I rant on here, but here goes.
Do you ever have days where life throws you a curve ball? I did today.
You see, we're in the middle of developing a client extranet website for one of our clients. This website will only be accessible to our clients, but I have been spending a great deal of time trying to make this new website fit into the Agency's corporate "look & feel". In the advertising business, as with any business (but perhaps even more), image is everything. So, I felt it of upmost importance that it exactly mirror the "voice" of our company and how our clients perceive us.
As you may have guessed, this is no easy task. With no less than 50 million vice presidents (half of them may be creative), I know that making everyone happy with the new design is virtually impossible. With that in mind, a few of us from ITS sat down today with one of the VPs to talk about it. I didn't expect the meeting to go well.
The weird thing is: the meeting went bad in different ways than I expected. The VP ended up saying that he does not want us to spend a whole bunch of time coming up with a new design, but rather use the existing design that we use on our Intranet. Bleh. I mean, don't get me wrong: I think the Intranet design is good for what it does. But ONLY for that. It's casual. It's playful. It's something you could show your Mom and she would enjoy it..but I would never want to show our clients this site as a representation of our company.
I won't get into too many of the other details, but it comes down to this: I just spent an entire month racking my brain to come up with an array of designs, hoping that at least ONE of them would be something useful. I even surveyed some of our Interactive Dept. folks to get their input on how to create the "voice" of the company. That alone was frusterating enough, and I was beginning to regain my confidence in my design abilities.
And it's not that the VP didn't LIKE my designs, he is skeptical of trying to push them through and get one of them approved. He also fears that it would not be consistant with the rest of our web presence. Well, lets see: Considering our clients will NEVER see our Intranet site, it shouldn't NEED to look anything like that site.
Folks, this is what happens when you have people telling you what to do that have little to no creative taste and absolutely no web-sense about them. This is not to imply that I'm an expert, because I make no claims as such.
Maybe we'll just go text-only.
Posted by Jeff at February 6, 2002 11:30 PMThis is a well-reasoned rant. One of our biggest struggles here is getting people to see things smartly. Things look great on paper or in discussions, but it isn't until people like you and me actually flesh it out into something that they look and say they hate it. And on top of it, the biggest slap in the face is when you aren't permitted to share your own (probably better) ideas. "Here, do this, and after a few months, I'll tell you to redo it better. But I'll stay quiet until that point."
Another big frustration is the apathy (i guess I'll write more in my work log about this) that the people who interact with customers have. These (above all others) need to be the high spirited, pushing the envelope, customer -oriented people. Alas, they all seem to hate their jobs and want no part in making things exciting or cutting edge. Why? Because they're tired. "good enough" is good enough. And that's a sad commentary. You're right to keep trying to push a new, healthy look. (although I still think your design for @Martin looks just fine) But ultimately, if the uppity-ups want something, you've just got to do it. They pay the bills, after all.
Posted by: B at February 7, 2002 02:00 PM