Part I The first year

The trouble is I like Austin. My son was born here, its a great community. I have friends. I have a business, and I actually have great in-laws. My son's grandparents are very supportive and helpful. The trouble is some of the rest of the in-laws. Oh, and I love austin community college.

But it is no small trouble. It is actually making me want to raise my son somewhere else, away from the gossip and speculation, somewhere away from all the mean-spirited bullshit that keeps getting hurled my way.

It started before we even moved here, because of a house that was bought that we were told we were moving into. But it wasn't a house for us it was a house we were supposed to keep clean and pretty so it could be sold. Us who have never been able to keep a small apartment presentable are supposed to keep a two-floor 2400 square foot house pristine so that it could be "flipped" (it didn't need to be flipped BTW) and sold again.

So of course I told my future husband my misgivings in detail. But it didn't matter everyone thought it was a great idea and my then-fiance convinced me that we would not be expected to keep the place "pristine" or keep the yard nice etc. But of course this was completely wrong. We were supposed to water, mow, weed, put out poison for pests, edge, fertilize, clean, dust, vacuum etc. All while trying to find jobs. So we did. Of course finding jobs was our priority so much of the rest got done irregularly.

It started only a few months after we got here. We started getting visits from a sister-in-law who would bitch us out for not "finding" jobs. Of course we were applying for multiple jobs every day and not getting any call backs. Then as it turns out she had a position at her office that my husband asks her about. He is informed that she "doesn't hire family." That is unless that family is her other brother and sister, both of whom she had let work for her when she needed extra help and they needed extra money. This just happened to be my husband's back-up plan in case he couldn't find a job, working for sister temporarily. I was led to believe he had that kind of family that would look out for each other when things got tough. She informed us early on that she couldn't and wouldn't employ us and that she was upset that we would even consider that an option and that we shouldn't have expected anything of the sort.

That would have been fine if her mother hadn't tried to get me to work for her multiple times when I was visiting them on vacation. That is the only reason we thought it was an option, but never mind that. Meanwhile we have even dropped down to applying at places like wal-mart and are still not getting any call-backs. It takes us 9 months to find jobs, and we are pretty much humiliated and treated like crap by his family the whole time. His sister visits about once a month to yell at us for not keeping the place clean and tells us to get jobs. I am spending hours a week weeding by hand because I couldn't afford to buy chemicals to kill the weeds, not to mention hours mowing and dusting. In the meantime every local family member decides they need to have us over to dinner at some point or other to talk to us.

We were informed that x sibling knew it was a bad idea for us to be in that house because we weren't "responsible" enough to handle it. We are informed that we are costing his parents hundreds of dollars every month, as we are spending the last of our savings to pay for food, electricity, and the other utilities in a house that was too big to afford. Then finally his mother decides to issue us an ultimatum. She basically says that we have to find jobs within the next week or she is going to kick us out.

She presented it like it was an "intervention," and like we were intentionally taking advantage of her and weren't even trying to find jobs. Well we had already joined a local UU church and had been talking about our job difficulties there for a while. We went to church after the "intervention," and told them we had a week to find jobs when suddenly two of them appeared thanks to the urgency.

Turns out they were some of the worst jobs imaginable. My husband had to completely drop an independent study program he was working on so that he could work 60 hours a week selling vacuums door-to-door and making lets see. Pretty much nothing. $400/month was the biggest paycheck I think he ever got. Plus he got lied to continuously, promised salaries and commissions that never materialized. He had to transfer to the kyle office to avoid getting laid off which is an hour drive away and he still gets paid nothing. Meanwhile I found a job for $7 dollars/hour working 6pm-6am in a clean room with dangerous chemicals and almost no safety equipment. I started breaking out after my second week.

I spent the next four months spending half my money on my own equipment to try and counter the rashes that spread from my arms to my face and lips. It was nightmarish. But back up just a bit because when we got the ultimatum I was so pissed off I wanted to move back to Georgia and I was ready too. After the hours I had put in to weeding by hand, and pulling weeds out of the sidewalk, mowing edging, vacuuming. After all I had done, all the conflicts we had already been put through, and all the humiliating conversations where we were informed that we weren't responsible enough, tidy enough etc for the "house." and then the ones where we were told that we weren't really looking for jobs or we would have found them, that we were trying to live off of my mother-in-law, that we weren't good enough to work for his sister etc. Meanwhile I applied at every graphics design job (I was coming from a job designing ads for a magazine), every magazine, newspaper, and then every receptionist job, cashier jobs, every classified job that I had any experience in, and then finally even walmart, lowes, and starbucks. Billee went on multiple interviews just to find out at the interview that the place expected him to bring in the clients not the other way around or that while he would be a financial adviser in theory he would only get paid on commission when he sold mutual funds. Or that he could have x job as long as he took y 500 dollar test that would take several months to study for, and oh BTW he would get paid on commision selling insurance, mutual funds, services etc. But we supposedly weren't trying.

Our whole experience the first year in Austin was just a long humiliating nightmare, where we were treated not as equals who had hit a difficulty but as deadbeats, we were told we were lazy, irresponsible, messy, poor, and basically not good enough. I was also informed that my writing career that I had gotten paying work in wasn't a real job. After we finally found jobs my fiance's parents decided to sell their house and move in with us while they were having another house built near my husband's brother. Of course we were told we had to clean the master bedroom out which involved hours of work, and hours scrubbing the bathroom and shower so that his parents could have the master bedroom for the short time that they were there. Meanwhile when the new house was finally built we were informed that we had a week to find an apartment and move out. Why had we not found a new apartment yet? Perhaps because I was working 50 hours a week doing a graveyard shift with perpetual medical problems and my husband was working 60 hour weeks... thats why.

I went with my father-in-law on my day off and signed a lease with the first apartment complex that I liked. It was small but clean, bright and pristine. I was actually looking forward to having a space that I could manage and keep clean. Meanwhile I had applied at massage therapy school and signed up for a loan to pay tuition. I found a job working as a cashier at homedepot, with better hours, better working conditions, and more benefits and it was just in time to. My rash cleared up only days before starting massage school. I was a few weeks into my massage training when I discovered I would have a week to get out of my home and into a new one. Thanks a lot. I had close to full time hours at work and another 12 hours a week of school. I had to spend every waking moment studying and packing. Then comes moving day. A day designated by my mother-in-law. Not one required for any other reason. I mention this because it just so happened to be on a day that I had 9 hours of school, or in other words I couldn't help in the process and we were moving into a third floor apartment.

Luckily my father-in-law volunteered to help and got his elder son to assist also (I found out later that he paid him for the privilege). I say luckily but I had already tried to get my husband to pay professional movers. We had used them in athens and I figured it would be a better safer way to do things.

Problem number one: you can't keep this couch because its too heavy, why don't you get rid of this. We'll put this up there instead... more negotiations on furniture and we end up with a giant torn-up dirty smelly leather love seat that I thought was ugly and horrific. Other bad furniture followed. Problem number two: We had to get a new dryer because there were no gas hookups at the apartment. Problem number three: they decided to try and move the washer by themselves, Which led to my father in law having to get stitches. Now here comes the nightmare part.

I get home after being in school from 8am-5pm and battling 5 o'clock traffic for another hour. I go up the stairs to my new apartment that I am looking forward to setting up and...

There are no boxes... everything had been "unpacked." By that I mean that with the exception of some of the glassware and dishes which had been unpacked and stacked on the counter, every single box had been opened and dumped upside down, and then the boxes were thrown away. There was a mountain of books in our room dumped on top of each other, and not in any orderly fashion, the books were upside down, pages getting bent, covers partially crushed. I couldn't even get to my bed. Every single room was filled with dumped out papers, dumped out magazines, dumped out dvd's, dumped out books. That wasn't even the worst though for some mysterious reason my husband's parents had decided that he had to take all the old boxes of stuff from when he was a kid with him on this move. So there were piles of old toys, piles of old photos, piles of old trophies. Junk everywhere. On top of that most of the unloaded dishes in the kitchen weren't even ours. They had unloaded the wrong boxes and brought some of his parents dishes over to our house instead. But because they had thrown out the boxes we couldn't even pack them up to send them back to the right place.

This all still gives me chills. It was so horrible and nighmarish. I came home looked at my apartment destroyed, all of mine and my husbands stuff treated like garbage, and realized that the apartment would likely never get to be the nice neat managable space I envisioned. I didn't have the time or energy to put it back together again. I sat down on the floor and just started crying. It was a few hours before I could stop.

We ended up paying a professional organizer to fix two of the rooms, but it took more than a year before I got all the toy dinosaurs and trophies out of the dining room, or that we even had space to eat. In the meantime we were criticized for spending so much money on the organizer and for not paying the brother who made the mess to clean it up if we were willing to pay someone else. Honestly even with my shitty father and grandparents, I don't think I have ever in my life felt like I was being treated like garbage, and for the second time in only about 4 months I deeply and sincerely wished I hadn't moved to Austin.

The "parents" of angels.

All kids take stuff that isn't theirs. They play with it, they hide it, they break it, they bury it in the backyard... it happens and generally nobody thinks the worse of them. Least of all myself. It happens to be a perfectly normal thing that kids do. Unfortunately some parents think their parents are magical little angels who would never do anything that anyone else might find frustrating or need remedying.

I am saying this because recently my debit card was taken out of my purse while some kids were visiting. I have a toddler so I knew it could easily have been him that did it, and I didn't think that any one of the kids was trying to rob me or anything so stupid or silly as that. However after searching everywhere for it and knowing that it was going to cost me 20 dollars to replace I was forced to call up the parents of the kids in order to see if they had "seen" my card. Yes I wanted to know if they had done something with it. In fact I was hoping they had, because if one of the older kids had done something with it we should be able to find it again. While if it was one of the toddlers it could just as easily be at the bottom of the garbage can or in a spot we wouldn't discover for the next 20 years.

In fact it did turn up, underneath the crock pot in one of the bottom cabinets several weeks later after I had already been forced to replace it. At the time I was hoping one of the older kids had seen it or put it somewhere where it could easily be retrieved. So I had my husband call them knowing he had a talent for putting things as gently as possible. And they were very nice. My husband made it very clear that we just needed to find it and we were hoping their kids had seen it or put it somewhere away from the little kids. They tried to help us find it offering a few suggestions as to where their toddler might have hidden or put it. Which led me to partially excavating a pretty nasty garbage can. But to no avail. We thanked them for the help. And we thought that was the end of it.

I figured it would turn up eventually and a few days later we ordered a new card. Six weeks later we find out the other "parents" had actually been harboring a grudge this whole time, claiming that I had "accused" their children of being thieves. Honestly I can't even describe how offensive and frustrating this is. First of all all kids take stuff that isn't theirs and I would never call a kid under 13 a thief because I genuinely don't think the term can apply to a mind that young. But never mind that, I'm sure that the insane response has something to with the fact that it was a debit card. We didn't call them when cameras, wii remotes, and cell phones went missing after their visit because we figured they would turn up... and they did. No point in making a big to-do over something that isn't that important. And honestly if I hadn't needed my debit card I wouldn't have said much about it, especially given the irrational response and grudge that these "parents" are holding. $20 dollars would have been a small price to pay to avoid this insanity and conflict we are now having to endure.

Unfortunately now it is being implied that I am creating a rift in the family and that it is my responsibility to sort through this insane response and fix what to me is nothing more than a bizarre play going on in someone else's brain that has nothing to do with me. My problem is I don't think I can be nice enough to fix it. I don't believe anyone could actually have that irrational of a response. It seems deeply dishonest especially after they made a point of being so nice on the phone. So either the "politeness" was a lie to hide the brewing emotional insanity or now we are being lied to as an excuse for some other manipulation. Regardless I don't see how I can be nice, diplomatic, or even apologetic in response to them.

If you are going to just assume everyone else is being evil, and unjust anytime your kid messes with something they are not supposed to and someone has to say something... well what's the point. I'm not interested in having a relationship in which I have to walk on egg shells around someone else, and their kids so that they can maintain the illusion that their kids aren't normal everyday get-in-ta-stuff kids. Nor will I. It is always the "angel kids" that make the giant messes at everyone else's house and never clean it up, break stuff and never get in trouble, hide stuff and are never asked to find it. While everyone else's kids have to pick up after themselves and the "angel kids."

We'll put them on a pedestal and pretend that they are naturally born knowing how to do everything right. While the rest of the kids actually have to learn it.

The Credit-Card Con

My experience with credit cards.

I was warned long ago, as a kid that credit cards were scams, but you know surely... surely a big well-respected business would participate in a fraudulent activity right?

Here is my experience.

After moving to Texas I was offered a credit card with Washington Mutual. It had a good low interest rate .99 plus the prime rate. At the time that was about 9 percent. That would only go up (or so I believed) if I defaulted or was continually late with my payments.

Well, it had a limit of 2500. I figured it could help with additional expenses etc. I had good credit from paying consistently on my student loans and so I figured that's why I was being offered a pretty good deal.

For the first couple years I barely used it, but then I needed it to pay for a few unexpected fees that arose. My job required me to liability insurance for massage, and then we had a major car repair. So suddenly I was carrying a balance. The finance fees were pretty low and I paid more than the minimum balance so I wasn't too concerned.

Then our Wedding came about and we had a number of last minute expenses/plane tickets for a sister etc. that were not covered in our budget plus another major car repair... The next thing I knew I was about 100 dollars shy of my credit limit. Ouch. So I stopped using the card for anything and moved money around to make sure that more than the minimum got paid every month.

Then I get a bill and in it I noticed that the previous month had incurred an additional fee. $39 for being "late." But I wasn't late I had sent the payment the same time I always had. Upon closer look I realized that they had moved my due date from the 14th to the 12th. Since I was paying electronically I had not noticed the discrepancy on my bill.

So I'm out $39 dollars. The next month I sent them my payment on the 12th brilliantly figuring that they wouldn't dare do the same thing again. They had moved the due date to the 10th. $39 but in addition they had raised my interest late a few points for being late the previous month and with the higher interest rate the finance charges had put me over my credit limit.

So they charged me an "over credit limit" fee. I was shocked. I had not used the card in several months and it hadn't occurred to me that the over-the-limit fee could apply to their finance charges and fees. So to sum up I was charged $39 dollars as a penalty for being charged $39 dollars late fee as a penalty for them changing my due date and for them raising my interest rate for being past my due date which they had changed the previous month without notifying me.

In all the minimum payment for that month was $170 dollars. The problem was with my income I could not afford to pay that month and pay the card down enough to keep them from pulling the same scam the next month. So I borrowed enough money from my husband to pay off the card entirely and then paid him back slowly over the next year.

So of course I should have ripped that card to shreds... but... I figured I might have an emergency...

I did my brakes went out and I was pregnant. The guy at pep boys talks me into getting an extra 900 dollars worth of repair that was needed... and could go out any day. I was imagining being in a wreck if I didn't get the x, y, or, z fixed and losing my baby. Good God, what do I do?

So 1600 dollars goes on the credit card. We had enough money to pay down the balance in a few months plus I wasn't anywhere near the limit, I certainly wasn't going to use it for casual spending (and I didn't). So why worry.

Oh, I know Washington Mutual had gotten into financial hot water and so while my card lay with no balance on it for about a year they had jacked up the interest rate to 29 percent.

Suddenly I had finance charges of over $80 dollars a month. I was thinking I could pay $200 a month and be balance free in 8 months.... but no. When I saw the $80 dollar fee I was shocked.

Even when they had previously raised my rates I had never paid more than about 25 dollars in finance charges. So I decided the time had come for abandoning the Wamu credit train. I moved my balance onto an American Express card that would have 0 percent interest on balance transfers for the first year and a low fixed rate of 3.5 percent after that. Whew... dodged a bullet.

Thus begins the next credit scam, American Express.

So my husband and I decided that we weren't going to fall for any more accounting tricks from credit card companies. Our minimum payment was only about 10 dollars do we decided we would send them $10 dollars every week. Which we did.

They were getting at least 40 dollars a month, and this continued for over a year. Unfortunately I used the card for something. I don't remember what now, probably an insurance premium. But it bumped up the minimum payment to over $10 dollars.

Of course we were sending them well over that so why would it matter? The answer is that creative accounting always wins. About 6 months late we get a notice in the mail that went something like this:

"Due to the continued delinquency of this account we will be raising your interest rate to the default rate of 29.9 percent."

We were shocked? What the hell were they talking about?! We had been sending them money every week for over a year and a half, and had consistently well in excess of the minimum amount due.

We checked our account statement. Which naturally we hadn't bothered to look closely at for the past few months. On it we found 2 late payment fees of $40 dollars for the past two months respectively.

They claimed our payments were late. How could they be late?! We had consistently over paid!

We called them to find out. As it turns out there was an 8 day period (I think it was 8 days, its been a while so I may be a day or two off) in which a payment had to arrive to be considered "on time."

One of our payments came during this time each month but for the past two months they weren't receiving the whole minimum balance (now more than 10 dollars) in that limited window (a window they had never ever ever mentioned on any paper, verbally or otherwise.)

So all the money that came in in the first week of the month did not count toward the amount due. It counted as a payment on the previous month. They had to get the money between the 7th and 15th in order for it to be counted toward that month. Any additional payments received in the last part of the previous month also didn't count.

So since our payments were only in part we were "late," and being "late" twice made us "delinquent." So they charged us... I mean ripped us off of... I mean STOLE 80 dollars from our account and then tried to raise our interest rate. We were able to cancel the account in time to prevent the new rate from applying, but it still floors that anyone is allowed to get away with this blatantly fraudulent activity.

Of course when we complained we were told that "this is what all the big banks do," or "this is standard industry practice."

Translation: The big banks and credit card companies make most of their money by defrauding their own clientele.

These are the businesses that we were told were "too big to fail." They are all still out there and our tax money paid them to stay afloat.

Taxation and Equality

So I understand that if you had a $300 tax that everyone was required to pay that it would effect people differently. People with less income would struggle with it, while those who were well off could pay it without batting an eyelid.

This is presented as regressive and "unfair." So the next argument goes that we should then charge a percentage. Lets say that everyone pays 5 percent... is that fair? Then we realize that for people struggling to survive 5 percent of their income could be the difference between them surviving or not surviving. While 5 percent of those with more income might not even effect them at all. One less trip per year on the private jet or something of that sort.

What does that leave us with. The response is that we should break income up into brackets and charge different rates for the different levels, the lowest level owing no tax and the highest level paying the largest percentage. Still people cry foul. This may help the poorest people but it leaves the middle class with a very high tax burden, while the richest still barely break a sweat with their "percentage."

At some point we have to realize that this whole process is insane. We would think it was horribly unfair and unreasonable to treat people differently under the law if they were of lower income, so why is it okay to treat people with more money that way.

Will we be better off if everyone has equal difficulty or ease paying taxes and how could you objectively determine that. I dispute the idea that if someone has more money than they could ever spend that they should therefore be carrying the rest of us on their shoulders.

Equality before the law means that you should not get to determine how to treat people based upon their socioeconomic status. We seem to spend a great deal of time in this country trying to make things "more equal." But that generally amounts to taking more and more and more money from those that have it to give it to those that do not have it.

Why is that equality? The person having their money taken is not being treated equally. The person who receives the money is not being treated equally before the law. Rather the legal system becomes an explicit system to create and maintain in-equal treatment. This is done in the name of "leveling the playing field."

The trouble is that it is never successful, and no amount of money ever seems to be enough. I have heard it said that the top 5 percent of income earners should have to give all of their money to the government. How could that be fair? And why would anyone continue to work if the government were taking that much of their money?

I think we should stop worrying about someone's difficulty to pay or not pay once they get higher than a certain income. Already someone who pays 5 percent of a million dollars is paying far more of "their fair share." Than someone who pays 5 percent of $100,000.

What I don't understand is why we have taxes at all. I don't know if anyone else has noticed but the IRS is a really nasty institution. Our income tax code is something like 2000 pages long, and every year we pay accountants billions of dollars to figure out and file our taxes for us.

How is it that we cannot come up with a more efficient system than this?

Taxation is inherently bureaucratic and therefore inefficient. Its enforcement is inherently violent. In this day and age we cannot come up with a better system for funding our government and public services... really? And yet most of the government is funded on bonds, and invisible taxes like taxes on gas and airlines.

So already we see that there are other ways just within the realm of what is happening now. But we are supposed to believe that these are inadequate by themselves in spite of the fact that the budget grows every year.

If we merely went back in time during my own lifetime (I'm 29) we could find national budgets that could be easily covered today without the use of an income tax. Forget about regressive, progressive etc. We should be working to figure out how to get rid of taxes entirely.

The best way to do that is by privatizing and deregulating services that the government does not need to be doing. Social security is at the top of my list, and then the school system. Follow it with medicare.

It was this idea that it was okay to tax the income of the top 5 percent that got us into our current tax regime.

The 16th amendment was sold to america on the grounds that only top income earners would be taxed and that it would be a very small percentage of their income 1-5 percent. Promises were made that the rest of us would never be taxed. Yet by the 60's not only was almost everyone being taxed but that top bracket was paying something like 90 percent of their income into the government.

Say what you will about Reagan, but I firmly believe he took the U.S. in a positive direction so far as reducing the tax burden, and deregulation is concerned.

My argument is that we should stop worrying about what the richest of the rich are doing, making, or paying. Instead let us figure out how to start removing the income tax from our nation entirely.

Dreams of Knowledge

So I had a somewhat amazing dream last night. I say "somewhat" because it seems so simplistic looking back at it. I have been thinking a lot lately about college and learning. Specifically I have been thinking about how unreceptive I was to "learning" when I first went to college.

It is truly ironic because I went "to learn." That was my only purpose. But I quickly found that I resented being in classes I did not want to be in. As soon as I found a subject I wanted to study and was fascinated by all the other classes seemed to be a distraction from it. I resented any class I thought wasn't taught well enough, or that the teacher didn't seem knowledgeable enough on the subject. So there was a great deal of resentment floating around, resentment that cut off my receptivity to actually learning and sometimes even understanding what they were saying.

What was worse was that I was very proud of how intelligent I believed myself to be and because I was also very introverted that made it unthinkable to me to ask anyone for help with anything. I had a final project, for example, that I failed to turn in because I couldn't get it to work after a great many hours (30plus) of trying. So instead of getting help with it I gave up... I didn't think I was going to pass the class anyway.... Turns out I would have passed if I had turned in what I had done... But it was actually impossible... unthinkable to me to ask or even to seek help on a project or in this case software that was confusing me.

So the dream was that I was taking classes with one of my brothers at a local college, and one of our classes was in a big out door auditorium. Most of the dream was about weird random conflicts with my brothers, and odd conversations I don't remember. When I finally got around to starting class and focusing on what the teacher was saying, he kept trying to teach us this old proverb.

It didn't make any sense to me. It was something like The crystal of knowledge lies in the sky and is illuminated in its time... I think it was a variation of one I learned in yoga teacher training: Mani Padme Hum: The jewel of consciousness lies at the lotus's center. That one didn't mean anything to me either.

So one day in the middle of class the teacher is talking to us about this proverb, and we had been wrestling with it for several days. We had stadium style seating on the side of a hill and could see some ways into the distance. The teacher was most of the way up the hill, and there I was arguing with him. I kept saying that what he was saying didn't really mean anything. I just know we were instructed to treat this proverb like we were on a treasure hunt and this "crystal" was the treasure we were looking for.

I was picking it apart, "what was this crystal, how could it be in the sky, why would it be illuminated... etc."

Suddenly, the sun hit the campus at the right angle and the entire campus was reflected in a mirage off in the distance. It was really beautiful, and everyone had this eureka moment.

We realized we were looking at ourselves. The treasure/crystal of knowledge arose out of our ability to see ourselves, and to examine a clear reflection of ourselves and thereby obtain self knowledge.

Moreover, we had to be in the right place, at the right time, and in the right frame of mind to see the mirage and thus find the "crystal of knowledge" we were looking for. It was like the dream was saying that sometimes you have to not only be present, but be receptive, to allow your mind to be changed in order to see and recognize the wisdom being offered.

I suppose I am making statements of the obvious. Still we had to be there to understand, we had to be actively seeking to understand at the right moment or it would have been just another sunset... perhaps a nice effect, but not a eureka.

It makes me think that maybe every class, every teacher, every subject just might have some jewel/crystal in it that I have to find. Some little or perhaps big speck of knowledge that will change how I look at things. Something that will change my perspective.

What I suspect is that I won't know what I am looking for, but will be trying instead to figure out how to look, and how to be receptive just in case said knowledge is staring me in the face.

Part II Design and Crowd-Sourcing

I know I have been a little long-winded with some of my previous posts about design but it was all for a purpose. It was all to give those who have not worked in a design business a sense of how one might run.

Of course not every business is the same and different firms can run very differently from each other. However, what seems to be remarkably similar among design companies is client behavior and designer behavior.

Clients are supposed to be able to say, this is the material I have, this is my goal for this ad/logo/brochure etc. now do what you do best... That rarely happens. I had one time that I designed a full page ad, and the client said: "It's perfect... just make my phone number a little bigger," and they really meant it.

That was close to the response we would get from a regular client once you knew their preferences well, but even then there were almost always a half dozen small changes, or more. "I wanted you to focus on the steak dish this month, not the pie." "Can you do one with the website listed, and one without it." "I want to see one with my logo in purple and one with it in pink." "I need you to add our second phone number, and fax number, and can you make the vacuum cleaner bigger."

Some clients wanted to pick out the photos that were used, even though they had already picked the content of the photos for the photo shoot.

So it just happens sometimes that clients are weird, unpredictable, or just difficult to work with. Most of them had small reasonable requests that fit in with the needs of their company and advertising... (our phone number changed, we moved across town... we need you to replace our old logo with our new one etc.)

Occasionally you get the "I don't know what I want... but I know what I don't want... and I know that I will know what I want when I see it..." client.

"Just make me something and I will tell you if I like it."

It makes me cringe just thinking about it.

And as I mentioned in my first post on the subject you often get the crazy ego client that wants you to spend extra time just so they can have their ego stroked, or feel like they got their money's worth.

The worst case scenario is a combination of the two. These are the people that say "I don't like this... do something else."

"Well what don't you like about it? The colors, the photo used, the font, the style?"

Knowing what they do not like is actually important information, and even with these clients you could usually get something out of them. Such as: "well the style is all wrong. We are an elegant restaurant and this is too playful, and we don't even want to focus on that dish. I don't know why they took a picture of it and I was hoping for a script font...."

You see all of a sudden the person who didn't know what they wanted is giving you valuable info.

This is exactly what does not happen in these online design contests... and it is so endlessly frustrating.

It is like they are combining freelance design, with amateur competition, with ego mania clientelé, and gave you the worst of all three.

What is the worst part of freelance design? I think it is having to deal with subjectivity and whims of clients. You have to walk a fine line between meeting the needs and wants of the clients which can sometimes be at odds with each other. Ideally a designer could avoid those clients who do not truly value that specific designer's style and expertise, but that is generally easier said than done. It is actually impossible in design contests, because "clients" do not pick the designers, nor do the designers have any real knowledge of the "clients."

Second as a freelancer you do not always get to work with a team of other designers. In design contests it is every designer for themselves. What do I mean by that... well in the non-blind competitions and I would guess about 2/3rds of the contests are non-blind. Everyone can see your design and the contest holder has the ability to rate your design.

If you were part of a design team it would not be unheard of nor unreasonable for another designer to render the same concept differently. We know the client wants bubbles in their design that go from small to large and for one bubble to surround the word... There are many different ways this could be portrayed... It is possible they might like the style of another designer better or a different presentation better.... There is no problem with that because as a part of a team you are still going to get paid, especially if you derived the concept that is ultimately chosen... even if your application of it is not used.

In these contests the moment you get a 4 or 5 star rating all the other designers will start devising variations of your design. Or as 99designs likes to say "you do not own the concept but the implementation of the concept." Which means the other designers can use the same font, and the exact same idea, implement it a little differently... like using an ellipse instead of a bubble or a flat circle instead of a 3-d one etc., and it is permitted. But if their blatant copy-catting gets picked as the winner... you get zero and they get paid.

Not only that but sometimes the client will decide that your concept is the one they want... which means the other designers, if they want a chance at winning, have no choice but to devise an "implementation" of your concept if they want to stay in the contest. Your design in-effect becomes the new design-brief.

What is your reward if your concept is chosen but your specific submission is not? nothing.

I was in a contest once in which another designer put up a fairly generic design. Orange chromatic dots in a straight line over the name of the company in a black sans serif font.

It got 4 stars. The winning design, submitted by another designer, used the same font, the exact same color dots/font, the exact same shade and size of dots, but put them in a spiral pattern instead of a straight line. That is what the client wanted and paid for.

They see all these designers as "their design team." So it is perfectly natural to see an alternative to a design that they like.

The other issue is that you cannot submit the exact same design as someone else or it is considered copyright infringement and could get you banned from the site.

So the original designer could not at that point resubmit the spiral design as a variation of their own work because that would magically be copyright infringement of the designer who is blatantly ripping off the previous designer. I have seen some designers get around this by putting up dozens of variations of their own design the moment they get a high rating. The problem is that it is really not possible to come up with everything someone else might derive off of your work.

This brings me to the idea of a contest. You see the trouble with creative contests in general is that they are often a pass/fail scenario. You do not get feedback, you do not find out how to improve etc. You just find out that you did not make it. The upside is that there are usually specific standards that they have to publicly announce that they will be judging you on, and they generally have to make it clear how they will be judging it.... That's the benefit of a contest.

Also, generally other people are not allowed to copy your work or derive work from it, particularly after it has been submitted. Imagine, for example, a poetry contest in which someone could read your poem after submission and use one of your stanzas as your own, or a drawing contest in which they could see that you used a tiger in your drawing and then use one of their own. This is almost universally considered cheating in normal talent-oriented contests.

But it is not "cheating" in a design contest because you are all a "design team," and why else would they be rating your designs except for the purpose of telling the designers what direction you want them to go in...

Then you get to deal with the huge crazy client ego that seems to grow out of these contests. There is something about having that "eliminate" button. I don't know what it is but I have been in so many contests in which hours of my work was eliminated without comment, even when there were very specific briefs, that were followed exactly with very skilled designs submitted.

Gone instantly... without any explanation, or criteria for what they are judging on.

So you don't get the benefit of even finding out what they don't like... only that they don't like your design... for some reason. Then if it is a visible contest you can only try and look at the designs they have rated or not-eliminated as some criteria for what they are actually wanting.

Sometimes these designs are very different from the "brief." Of course that wouldn't matter if they were your client... clients change their minds... but contest holders are not supposed to get to change their minds. They are supposed to have to stick to the guidelines they set out or its not really a contest. That is like changing the rules of a game in the middle of it.

So we are supposed to function like designers and be willing to give revisions if requested, as if they were our actual client... some clients request this... But even then, it is a delicate issue. If you rate my design one star and then ask for a different color... well what's the point? Will you like it that much more in blue instead of red and I've already wasted several hours on this... the prize is 250... do I want to waste a few more?

Honestly every time I have ever done a revision of my design at 99designs the "client" liked the new design less and generally rated it lower. Plus there is another issue: sometimes they don't exactly ask properly for you to revise it. Why does this matter? because you are not their design team and you are not getting paid. Since they are holding all the money, and all the cards most clients end up on a weird ego trip where they suddenly envision themselves your boss whom you are supposed to be bending over backwards for.

"I need to see this is 3 different colors." "You need to design some kind of symbolic icon to go with this." etc. My response.... "um I did as much as I am willing to do if I were getting paid $200 dollars for this design. Which I am likely not, seeing as you want some specialized icon designed which was not mentioned before."

Likewise your designs get dismissed sometimes with snarky comments. As if you were somehow foolish to think that that would be a good interpretation of their brief. Often when designers complain that no feedback was given on their design the contest holders says something like "the designs submitted varied greatly in quality and the ones eliminated didn't warrant any comments."

So is it a design contest in which it is reasonable to get eliminated with no real feedback... pass/fail style?

Or is it a designer-client relationship in which finding out what they do not like about your design is just as important as finding out what they do like.

For as a contest they get to change the guidelines without notice, extend the length of the contest, edit the brief, judge without any criteria, end the contest on a whim, and even withdraw the contest without awarding anyone. I have seen contests that did this after awarding designs 4 and 5 stars. They loved the designs and still didn't pick a winner.... mmmhmmmm.

If it is a client-designer relationship then I should get paid for work that is derivative of my own, I should get some feedback after I have spent hours of work for you even if it is simply to tell me what you do not like or how I failed to achieve what you wanted, and finally I should get paid for my time even if the client changes their mind about getting the logo.

Imagine if a client came to you and said... I love this design, and the concept is great... let me talk to 20 other designers and see what they will do with this concept before I agree to going with yours.... and BTW if I like their design better I will pay them and not you.

Meanwhile the one contest I have won thus far, the client didn't even know what file types he was asking for. He promptly emailed me to tell me he could not open the illustrator file I provided, that he had specifically asked for, because he did not have the right software. This guy wanted 7 different file formats btw. So he requested that I email him the software for opening it.

That's right he wanted me to email him software that was worth more than the award for his contest... seriously. I told him to download adobe reader.

Even nicer clients, who mysteriously do not end up on an ego trip, are still like your worst lunatic client. The one who thinks you should bend over backward for them even if they don't pay you, who has absolutely no sense of fairness or loyalty to you, and who will stab you in the back at a moment's notice. It's like having a contest run by a child that doesn't know what they really want, and has no clue what design is all about, and thinks any whim that fancies them is just fine, even refusing to pay anyone.

Meanwhile the commitment designers show by submitting a well rendered design that followed the specifications of the client is almost never honored. Why would it be... if 50 designers submit designs who has time to comment on them all, or even bothering to thank them before eliminating their entry.

And the worst part is, truly inferior designs often win over the more skilled ones. I actually created a custom text for one contest. I was really pleased with what I came out with. It was simple: two colors conveyed the idea very clearly, and was the exact sort of font they were looking for... I couldn't find one I was satisfied with so I rendered my own... with my pen tool, illustrator, and lots of time.

Someone else put the same words in a generic sans serif... in black with an orange rectangle over it to represent a "sales tag." It got 4 stars... mine got 2. (BTW it was a good thing that I lost... I noticed afterwards that they requested the winning logo be put into a business card design, website header, and stationary design, all for the same prize $200... seriously). I lost one to a design that was a messy recreation of the Ubuntu logo with a couple of large dots in the middle, it wasn't clear what the dots were for but it didn't really make any sense in terms of that contest.

There is often no rhyme or reason to any of the "client's" choices. But why would there be? They do not have a skilled professional walking them down the path helping them choose the right style, font, icon, colors for them. No one is helping them make an informed decision on what will best serve their needs. Their design team is a team in the same sense that a bunch of betas in the same bowl are a family, and the only incentive a designer would have for helping the client is some guarantee that they would get paid... a guarantee they cannot give them until the contest is actually won... and the final design is picked.

So ummmm... no you aren't "slapping other designers." If other designers can't convince clients to go for a real professional designer or design team, over the proverbial cock-fight of the design world, then they are a huge failure at marketing themselves, specifically at knowing what makes them, their skill set, and a working relationship with them valuable and great.

If they can't do that much for themselves how exactly will they be able to pull it off when designing a logo, a brochure, an ad, or a website? How are you going to help your client figure out a direction for their design that will appeal to their target market, if you can't communicate your own basic value as a professional to other human beings? Come on the slapping other designers thing is weak. Especially since many of the designers on these sites are from less developed countries.

The only designer you are slapping or perhaps should be slapping is yourself when you participate in these contests. Though I do think you may be doing a disservice to the "client" as well. It just kind of feels like doing a massage without knowing the contraindications for massage. Fever... what fever?

Another interlude on My Design Experience

Once upon a time, long ago when I was designing ads for a small local magazine, a brief came through for a regular client of ours. They owned a jewelry business, and to be frank they were generally a big headache.

For their very first ad for example, we had to "clean up" or rather "rebuild" the client's logo which someone seemed to have put together in microsoft paint... or maybe they just drew it right onto the business card... I'm not sure. In any case we had to rebuild it exactly, even to the point of rendering a unique font... just without all the mess that came with its initial creation.

Lots of fun, that I luckily did not have to participate in. Other quirky issues came about periodically with this client, but this particular month promised to be an easy one. The jeweler wanted to feature men's platinum wedding rings. The ad was to target men who were well off and thinking about getting married. So we got adjectives like "high-end," "sophisticated," and "male-oriented."

So what did I have to work with? Their photo shoot had produced some very nice close-ups of four of their platinum wedding rings for men. Unfortunately the light in the pictures came out very pinkish making the photo look more like it was advertising charm bracelets to little girls.

So I picked out a good shot of the rings and got to work. I decided that since there was so much pink and peachyness in the picture to adjust the colors more toward the orange end instead of pink. I also decided to work on increasing the contrast, and decreasing the color overall so that the shine, and silver color of the rings would really pop.

After over an hour of adjustments I ended up with a photo that looked at first glance like it was only using 3 colors: black, white, and a pale shade of orange. It was awesome. The orange tint was right along the shine on the ring that was the focal point of the photo and most of the other colors were effectively gone. The black and white really made the delicate gradient of the silver just pop out. It looked elegant, sophisticated, and very masculine for a jewelry ad. I got dozens of compliments from the other designers.

Everyone thought it was perfect... we even told our customer service rep to explain to the client in detail what the design did, and how it did it... and to compare it to ads in very expensive national publications... etc.

The client hated it. Our editor-in-chief even called to argue on behalf of the design because he thought it was that great... but it was to no avail. They requested we use the same image but without any adjustments... That's right pink, no contrast, washed out colors on the rings... It really did look like an ad for little girls.

Now, I'm not saying that the client was wrong and I was right. Though certainly I think my design did a far better job of what they asked for, than what they insisted upon later. However I didn't know their clients, and it is entirely possible that my somewhat stylized color scheme was all wrong for the real target market. It is also possible, and likely that the client went with their own aesthetic preferences over what would have been best for their target market.

I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. The target market was not as high-end/sophisticated as we were led to believe, and the local market may not have "gotten" the ad that I made. (That's right you aren't sophisticated enough for MY AD... or in other words if I run my beautiful, fabulous, amazing ad it will likely be a failure and waste of money for the client... same difference right...) Likewise, the client did not realize that the pink and low contrast of the original photo would not likely appeal to the intended audience.

But instead of trying to appeal to them on the idea of "not going in that direction" we were focused on trying to get them to go in the direction of the ad that we thought was best. So we ended up with an ad that the client liked, the designer hated, and that likely failed in reaching its target audience. Believe me, it was very pink.

The trouble was since we were primarily a magazine functioning as a design firm we were a little out of our league when it came to figuring out what were reasonable revision requests.

In this case a simple "I don't like what you did to the photo," would have sufficed. We could have come up with a softer version with the pink removed or even gone for a gray scale version. Once the client started telling us to do the same picture without adjustments... all of our designs skills and aesthetic/marketing knowledge got removed from the equation.

Just put this here, and that there, and our logo here and that will magically do what the ad is intended to do right?

But the fact is we weren't a design firm... we were the production team of a magazine who was "building their ad," we were not "designing their marketing." That was apparently a delusion we kept stumbling into whenever a client accidentally mentioned a target market, or an intended goal for the ad. Funny how that happens.