Designer?

What is the most weird design work a client asked you to design?

Me: a client once asked me to design for him a canvas with a picture of him and his girlfriend and he wanted to write " sorry for cheating on you" on it!! It was awkward.

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I was once asked to design a fetish website. I passed on the work.

I did an awesome series of simplified raptor graphics, in my own inevitable quirky style, one of which wound up coming back to me in an email with a client request for it to be used as a large tattoo.

The design of raptor heads are all geometrically designed which encompass a triangular area descriptive of the bird’s head and beak.

So the client requested that I fill this area with the flag of Lebanon …and then below the bird depict the cross swords of Islam accompanied with some Islamic text.

Nope, … was my one word reply.

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Several years ago, I got a call from a realtor who had just gotten her license and wanted a logo. When I met with her in person at her house, she had already drawn out the logo and just wanted me to “make it prettier” and “more high-end” so it would appeal to the sellers and buyers she was planning to target.

She had crudely sketched out a shopping cart full of houses, with her baby’s head sticking out from one of the chimneys. The shopping cart was being pushed by her full-sized pet poodle that was walking upright on its hind legs. She also asked me if I could somehow work her pink Cadillac into the logo (seriously she had a pink Cadillac in her driveway), but admitted that doing so might detract from the shopping cart, which, along with her baby’s head, she considered the most important thing.

I tried to explain why none of this would work, then she accused me of being an amateur and how I was the third or fourth amateur who had told her the same thing. She went off on a rant about hired help, then asked me to leave. It was weird.

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I have designed a website for a “High class escort”. It was a girl I went to college with. She also got a degree in graphic design and I hear she’s doing really well! There are actually very strict legal regulations that you have to have to follow.

I didn’t host it, though. That goes against the TOS of the servers I’m using.

That part is sort of amusing, and something my friends and I would toss around as a joke.

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This here just made my freaking dayy!!!

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That has got to be the funniest thing I’ve read in a while. Now I’m dying to know if any “real Pro” stepped up and brought her dream logo to fruition :smiley: LOLOL!!!

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I don’t really know. It was around 20 or 25 years ago. I never saw any real estate yard signs anywhere with the name on it. A quick Google search tells me there’s no company by that name here in the state. I’m doubting it ever got off the ground.

She wanted to call her business Market Realty, so her logic was that a shopping cart, like those at the supermarket, full of houses would suggest people shopping for houses. She wanted the baby in it because she thought it would be good to let homebuyers know she was family-oriented. I don’t remember the logic behind the poodle other than she loved it. Her hair was a bleached-out white that had been tinted to be a pale pinkish color, which I assumed was to match her Cadillac when she made her appearances to show homes. She told me her car was important because it spoke to her affluence and success.

It was obvious that she had thought long and hard about this, and was not about to be talked down from any of it. It was weird.

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thx!!!

gotta do what I gotta get done

A while back a team member from a previous client of mine asked me to make a “joke” design for them to use internally at the company. The company made body lotions; they wanted me to create a realistic looking body lotion product that was phallic in shape and contained laundry list of misogynistic sexual innuendos.

I begrudgingly agreed and apparently the design went over so well with the d-bag executives they decided to actually turn it into a real product! Thankfully the sales numbers exposed how terrible of an idea this was and they discontinued it almost immediately.

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Merch for a stripper.

Met her at Mail Boxes Etc, when I helped her unload a bunch of big boxes of mailing tubes she was going to send. All the mailing tubes were drenched in perfume. She said she was a dancer and had a fan club… consisting of mostly prison inmates, especially ones in for a long haul. They would pay for personalized posters and photos. Or they could pay her for ‘the girlfriend experience’, where she would hand write love letters to them and include snapshots of her doing things like washing a car or cooking breakfast. She said she was very popular. Guys would brag that they had a supermodel girlfriend, because who but a supermodel would have their own posters. And then they’d show the other guys the love letters and snapshots to prove that she was really their girl.

This was early internet era, before social media. She asked if I would create her newsletter and get the posters printed. I said I would need a down payment and the balance due before it went to print, and that was the last I heard from her.