No creative control = No job satisfaction

I know it’s silly and unimportant in the big scheme, but I’m having a creative crisis.

I have little creative control in my work at the moment and it is cracking me up from the inside. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself it’s just work and that I have to do it to keep the roof over my head. Once you engage your creativity for a project, it becomes something else.

I keep telling everyone I’m not a real graphic designer and this proves it to me. I am much better at free-form creativity than following a plan. I am much better at following my own plans than working to someone else’s design. I will always resent it when I don’t get to decide where the thing I am engaged creatively on is going.

Graphic Design is where you present a draft based on the clients brief. They then tell you the ten things they forgot to mention. You redraft. They then change their minds and give you the ideas that five other people had. You then attempt to bolt everyone else’s creative ideas to yours and wonder why everyone couldn’t have gotten together and brainstormed in the first place. Brainstorming with other people is so much more acceptable than having to redesign or attempting to amalgamate ideas that don’t mesh.

While I’m whinging – The never-ending job – Where the client gives you changes in dribbles and continues to change even as the resource is deployed, so that you end up with a resource that goes out with different details and you begin to lose track of which version is correct. The client throws in a couple of incorrect details, so you will keep all your old versions, because you may need to go back to them – some versions go out with mistakes because of the client and some because you are confused. Some versions go out with mistakes because there are 5 different permutations of the job for different end uses and not all get updated during the rush to change, fix and meet deadlines.

Jobs just seem to run into each other now with no light at the end of the tunnel – it all seems endlessly wrong.

Next person who says that it must be nice to do ‘Art’ all day, gets it.

(Link is to - Clientcopia : Stupid Client Quotes... Because this is what designers do when they are sick of beating their heads against walls, and even fake designers do this....)