RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
I have a client I want to fire. I like the client, but I'm not the right guy for this job.
The developer needs to competent in HTML, PHP and CSS. Not a guru, but competent. Further opportunities would exist if the developer is competent in databases, building custom front ends, and so forth.
But more importantly, the developer also needs to be an artist -- or at the very least be proficient in Illustrator and have much more patience with artists than I possess.
The gig is basically to take what a college-student / artist is creating in Illustrator, and translate it into a Web site. The problem is that the student artist, although very pleasant, has ZERO knowledge of how HTML and CSS work. Zero. None. Nada. She didn't even know what "hover" meant until I explained it to her.
English is not her first language, but she does speak it very well; so I think this is not a language problem, but rather complete and total ignorance of how the Web works.
She's also a control freak, like most artists I know; and she finds it impossible to understand that the Web doesn't afford the granularity of control that Illustrator does. Her latest tantrum has to do with how browsers render overlines. She wants to add a pixel or two of distance between the text and the overline. She's obsessing about it, in fact. As in sending me about half a dozen emails about it, along with two or three phone calls.
In short, she wants everything to look exactly like what she created in AI, and is unwilling to accept even a pixel of difference here or there. She refuses to accept that browsers don't afford that degree of control, and that sometimes the best you can do is make it look "close enough" across browsers and platforms.
Now... this gig could turn into some real money down the road. I agreed to do only the basic design, and then bail out. What remains to be done after that is actually building the site, which will be heavily database-driven and probably could be a very nice, ongoing gig. I simply don't have the time to commit to that, nor the desire, quite frankly. I have three other projects I'm behind on, plus my ongoing work for my bigger clients eats up half of every day.
I'm supposed to be semi-retired, but I'm pulling 10- to 12-hour days lately. The money's nice, but it's not what I want at this point in my life.
All that being said, the client doesn't argue about money, and the artist is actually very nice, despite her being a temperamental, obsessive-compulsive control freak -- or in other words, an artist. They're all pretty much the same, in my experience. They're artists, and artists are passionate. This one is just too young to have learned that passion must sometimes bow to practicality.
I want to get the basic design done, and then bail. But the client is going to want more design work. The artist has designs for different pages that are very subtly different (an in, I'm scratching my head trying to tell what the differences are), and of course there will be other inevitable changes down the line.
They also want a separate mobile site. They were waffling back and forth between a responsive design and a separate site. But if you read what I wrote above, then it should be clear why responsive won't work here. We're talking about someone who obsesses about a pixel or two of space under an overline. There's no way in heaven, hell, or anywhere in between that I could build a responsive site that would satisfy her desire for absolute control over its appearance -- especially because now she wants to use images for things like links and buttons, because CSS doesn't afford her sufficient control over things like that.
Even drop shadows make her crazy because the CSS box-shadow property neither offers the same degree of control that AI does, nor are CSS-defined shadows rendered in exactly the same way by different browsers. And when I say "exactly," I do mean EXACTLY.
She's an artist. To me, that basically says it all.
This job doesn't require a guru in terms of basic Web skills. It requires someone who either (1) is himself / herself an artist and can relate to the student artists' OCD about things like box shadows and overline spacing; or (2) has the patience of Saints Joseph, Jude, and James combined -- and maybe then some.
Anyone crazy enough to be interested, please PM me. I intend to finish the basic design and then bail. But I do actually like the client, and I'm looking for people I might be able to recommend to take my place at that time.
Note that I have no guarantee, nor even any reason to believe, that the client will ask for or accept my recommendation. Apparently they do have other designers and developers that they use. Why they chose me, I'm not even sure. As best as I can tell they liked one of my other designs, and the artist got obsessed with having me "translate" hers.
That's kind of ironic, actually, because I consider myself to be barely adequate as a designer. My late business partner used to be the artist. I was the code monkey. But such is life, I guess.
-Rich
The developer needs to competent in HTML, PHP and CSS. Not a guru, but competent. Further opportunities would exist if the developer is competent in databases, building custom front ends, and so forth.
But more importantly, the developer also needs to be an artist -- or at the very least be proficient in Illustrator and have much more patience with artists than I possess.
The gig is basically to take what a college-student / artist is creating in Illustrator, and translate it into a Web site. The problem is that the student artist, although very pleasant, has ZERO knowledge of how HTML and CSS work. Zero. None. Nada. She didn't even know what "hover" meant until I explained it to her.
English is not her first language, but she does speak it very well; so I think this is not a language problem, but rather complete and total ignorance of how the Web works.
She's also a control freak, like most artists I know; and she finds it impossible to understand that the Web doesn't afford the granularity of control that Illustrator does. Her latest tantrum has to do with how browsers render overlines. She wants to add a pixel or two of distance between the text and the overline. She's obsessing about it, in fact. As in sending me about half a dozen emails about it, along with two or three phone calls.
In short, she wants everything to look exactly like what she created in AI, and is unwilling to accept even a pixel of difference here or there. She refuses to accept that browsers don't afford that degree of control, and that sometimes the best you can do is make it look "close enough" across browsers and platforms.
Now... this gig could turn into some real money down the road. I agreed to do only the basic design, and then bail out. What remains to be done after that is actually building the site, which will be heavily database-driven and probably could be a very nice, ongoing gig. I simply don't have the time to commit to that, nor the desire, quite frankly. I have three other projects I'm behind on, plus my ongoing work for my bigger clients eats up half of every day.
I'm supposed to be semi-retired, but I'm pulling 10- to 12-hour days lately. The money's nice, but it's not what I want at this point in my life.
All that being said, the client doesn't argue about money, and the artist is actually very nice, despite her being a temperamental, obsessive-compulsive control freak -- or in other words, an artist. They're all pretty much the same, in my experience. They're artists, and artists are passionate. This one is just too young to have learned that passion must sometimes bow to practicality.
I want to get the basic design done, and then bail. But the client is going to want more design work. The artist has designs for different pages that are very subtly different (an in, I'm scratching my head trying to tell what the differences are), and of course there will be other inevitable changes down the line.
They also want a separate mobile site. They were waffling back and forth between a responsive design and a separate site. But if you read what I wrote above, then it should be clear why responsive won't work here. We're talking about someone who obsesses about a pixel or two of space under an overline. There's no way in heaven, hell, or anywhere in between that I could build a responsive site that would satisfy her desire for absolute control over its appearance -- especially because now she wants to use images for things like links and buttons, because CSS doesn't afford her sufficient control over things like that.
Even drop shadows make her crazy because the CSS box-shadow property neither offers the same degree of control that AI does, nor are CSS-defined shadows rendered in exactly the same way by different browsers. And when I say "exactly," I do mean EXACTLY.
She's an artist. To me, that basically says it all.
This job doesn't require a guru in terms of basic Web skills. It requires someone who either (1) is himself / herself an artist and can relate to the student artists' OCD about things like box shadows and overline spacing; or (2) has the patience of Saints Joseph, Jude, and James combined -- and maybe then some.
Anyone crazy enough to be interested, please PM me. I intend to finish the basic design and then bail. But I do actually like the client, and I'm looking for people I might be able to recommend to take my place at that time.
Note that I have no guarantee, nor even any reason to believe, that the client will ask for or accept my recommendation. Apparently they do have other designers and developers that they use. Why they chose me, I'm not even sure. As best as I can tell they liked one of my other designs, and the artist got obsessed with having me "translate" hers.
That's kind of ironic, actually, because I consider myself to be barely adequate as a designer. My late business partner used to be the artist. I was the code monkey. But such is life, I guess.
-Rich
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