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I was a senior designer at a small design agency, the kind that does branding and web work for local businesses — restaurants, gyms, a couple of real estate developers. I liked the work in theory. In practice, most of my three years there were spent revising things that didn't need revising, for clients who confused having opinions with having taste.
There was one client, a restaurant chain expanding to a third location, who I'll be revising logos for in my nightmares. Round one, he wanted it "more premium." Round two, "more local, but still premium." Round three through eight blur together, but I remember round nine specifically because that's when he said, and I quote, "can you make the blue more blue."
I asked what that meant. He said he'd know it when he saw it. I made six versions of a slightly different blue. He picked the first one, the exact one we'd started with three rounds earlier. Nobody in that meeting laughed except me, internally, in a way that probably showed on my face.
That would've been a funny story to tell at drinks if it were an isolated case. It wasn't. Our account manager never pushed back on scope, because the agency ran on relationships and nobody wanted to be the one who annoyed a client into leaving. So designers absorbed the cost. Free revisions stopped being free labor and started being the entire job.
The final straw was a meeting, an actual scheduled one, where leadership announced we'd be adding "unlimited revisions" as a selling point in our new pricing package. I sat there watching people nod along to a policy that meant infinite unpaid work with a straight face, and I thought about the blue logo guy, and I thought about my rent, and I raised my hand and asked how designer hours would be compensated under unlimited revisions. The answer was something about "efficiency gains" that didn't actually answer the question.
I quit six weeks later. Not because of one client and not really because of one meeting, but because that meeting made visible something I'd been feeling for a year: the agency had decided designers were the pressure valve for bad sales promises, and that wasn't going to change from the inside.
I'm freelancing now, picking my own clients, saying no to blue-guy energy whenever I smell it early. It's less stable. It's also the first time in years I've finished a project and actually liked what I made.
There was one client, a restaurant chain expanding to a third location, who I'll be revising logos for in my nightmares. Round one, he wanted it "more premium." Round two, "more local, but still premium." Round three through eight blur together, but I remember round nine specifically because that's when he said, and I quote, "can you make the blue more blue."
I asked what that meant. He said he'd know it when he saw it. I made six versions of a slightly different blue. He picked the first one, the exact one we'd started with three rounds earlier. Nobody in that meeting laughed except me, internally, in a way that probably showed on my face.
That would've been a funny story to tell at drinks if it were an isolated case. It wasn't. Our account manager never pushed back on scope, because the agency ran on relationships and nobody wanted to be the one who annoyed a client into leaving. So designers absorbed the cost. Free revisions stopped being free labor and started being the entire job.
The final straw was a meeting, an actual scheduled one, where leadership announced we'd be adding "unlimited revisions" as a selling point in our new pricing package. I sat there watching people nod along to a policy that meant infinite unpaid work with a straight face, and I thought about the blue logo guy, and I thought about my rent, and I raised my hand and asked how designer hours would be compensated under unlimited revisions. The answer was something about "efficiency gains" that didn't actually answer the question.
I quit six weeks later. Not because of one client and not really because of one meeting, but because that meeting made visible something I'd been feeling for a year: the agency had decided designers were the pressure valve for bad sales promises, and that wasn't going to change from the inside.
I'm freelancing now, picking my own clients, saying no to blue-guy energy whenever I smell it early. It's less stable. It's also the first time in years I've finished a project and actually liked what I made.
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