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Love this > When Jobs was asked what it was like to work with Rand, he said, “I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solv
by rubyfan 8y ago
Love this
> When Jobs was asked what it was like to work with Rand, he said, “I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.’”
- Apocryphon 8y agoThere's always a bigger fish.
- theoh 8y agoSame story here with Richard Serra: "Serra was invited to outline a proposal, for a fee, but said no. According to Cross, Serra told Ross, “You know what I do—you know that it’s going to be structural steel, you know it’s going to be monumental. What do I need to show you?” He added, “Hire me and I’ll go to work.” (Serra, through a representative, confirmed that he declined to participate but denied that he used these words.) Ross, recalling the encounter, described Serra’s work as poorly suited for the site, because it was “very subtle” and “not iconic."" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/thomas-heatherwick-architectures-showman https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/thomas-heather... You get to a certain level, you can charge for your process, as it should be.
- bluedino 8y agoWeb design, every day. Customer has a shit site, they know it’s shit, they want to pay someone $$$ to do a new site, and they want to change 75% of the new design because they think they know better than the designer...
- inthewoods 8y agoBecause the designer isn’t Paul Rand. You earn the privilege through having tremendous success. Most designers simply can’t do that.
- thesagan 8y agoMore likely because they can't sell like Paul Rand did. It usually comes down to the pitch.
- 21 8y agoBrilliantly captured here: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
- combatentropy 8y ago"You are no longer a web designer. You are now a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing, and instant messaging." That's a hilarious comic. It reinforces why I took two steps down a career in graphic design and then ran away. I would love to read a treatment of why the client-designer relationship is often so dysfunctional. I know we all can trot out ideas, but I want an in-depth, serious, unsarcastic treatment, all the better if it points to a cure.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI noticed the guy who designs icons for me always leaves what appears to be a deliberate mistake, I then point it out and it gets fixed. I know what he is doing and I'm pretty sure he knows I know what he is doing.
- lmkg 8y agoIt's called The Duck Technique, after an apocryphal story of an animator for Battle Chess. http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck-technique http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck-technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess#Development
- DonHopkins 8y agoI've been tempted to make a Removable Duck for Unity3D and sell it on the Unity asset store for hourly freelance developers to use. It will quickly pay for itself: The developer can drag a duck into the scene and configure it to define how many hours it will take to remove, and what kind of removal interface and effect to use. Then when they show the demo to the client, and the client demands "Remove the duck!", then can say "Ok. That will take X hours." Then they simply type some secret hot keys or click on some invisible hot spots for a while, and the duck will pop up a count-down timer and slowly start shrinking or dissolving or whatever, until it finally disappears after X hours with a puff of smoke, and then the developer can bill the client for that many hours.
- jhbadger 8y agoWhich in turn is a version of the old tradition of movie directors to include a scene that was so over-the-top that when asked by studio executives/MPAA to cut the movie a bit, this scene can be sacrificed.
- mattkevan 8y agoAfter working in a web agency for years I learned to be very wary if the client’s current website is terrible. My first reaction was to think ‘what a terrible job the previous lot did, I’m sure we can do better than that’. But it’s always the clients fault. Either they slowly unpick all the design decisions so the new site is no better than the old one, or they balk at the cost, get it developed on the cheap overseas, then pay us more than the original quote to fix all the resulting problems. Good clients already have good websites.
- newnewpdro 8y agoReminds me of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead
- bunderbunder 8y agoThat's how my tailor operates, too, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If sartorial skills were my forte, I'd be his competitor, not his customer.