I cannot make any sense out of this. Your supervisor is aware of all the changes going on, and he/she is cautioning you, not the VP, that there were multiple revisions?
Do you keep a paper trail? I suggest you start one now if you didn’t.
What you described is unreasonable, but there’s another side to this that we haven’t heard.
A new person somewhere up the ladder who thinks they know more about the people’s jobs below them than the people in those jobs is always a problem. It’s also quite common for incompetent people to rise up through the ranks then inflict their incompetence on those who report to them. I’ve seen it happen many times.
Then again, none of us have seen your work. We don’t know why they asked you for multiple revisions. Maybe they’re just clueless, micro-managing nitwits. Maybe your work really isn’t up to par and the new person is wanting better. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. I’m not making judgments — it’s just that I have no way of knowing.
If you really believe you’re right and they’re wrong, request a meeting with the VP to discuss it. Establishing a personal connection where you can get first-hand information about what this person expects seems to be important since you’re obviously, for whatever reason, not meeting this person’s expectations at the moment.
The written-up warning seems over-the-top, which leads me to think their might be more to this than meets the eye. Or maybe your direct supervisor is also feeling threatened by the new VP and is under pressure to do something. It’s really impossible for me, or any of us, to say.
It really boils down to a few choices. You can continue on doing whatever it might be that is displeasing them. You can start looking for a new job. Or you can try to constructively get to the bottom of what they’re unhappy about, then make your decisions accordingly.
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Getting it right the first time, or final approval at proof #1, is the holy grail of any graphic designer. It doesn’t happen very often I know. I also know there are some (but not too many) designers who tweak their work to death, but that’s another story. All I’m saying is, no designer will wilfully make revisions for no reason at all.
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But that’s impossible if the copy you’re given is tweaked all the time.
Policy should be that the written copy for the design is signed off before any designing.
And this is where non-designers who have access to designers don’t realise. They think it’s ok to give a version 1 of something and then keep tweaking the copy until it’s done to death. They can’t visualise the design, they focus too much on it. They want to see it designed before committing the copy.
The truth is - if they focussed on the content and the copy and that signed off as a clear messaging exercise, then the design would come quicker and easier.
Seems like everyone was involved in tweaking this. And I bet the VP wasn’t too happy to keep re-reading mistakes all the time. I bet the supervisor got it in the neck and blamed it down the ladder rather than absorbing the brunt and working on improving communications.
It ended up just being a finger-pointing exercise to get out of trouble.
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That’s exactly my point.
Where I used to work full-time, all copy must get signed off by Linguistics (French OR English) before passing on to the art department. Still, there were marketing types who would bypass the process and sneaked one on to us.
I smell a power grasp.
Well, of course, I was just agreeing with you.
… and I you.
A written warning for multiple revisions is certainly over the top.
Were you briefed correctly to design a new look for the newsletter?
Although I don´t know the ins and outs, to me it sounds like the VP becoming the “art director/designer” without really knowing what she wants, having you try all her changes and you winging it until you get it right.
Somebody has already mentioned it on this forum but with this many changes you get the Art Director involvedor better yet you speak directly with the VP to work out what it is she is after.
Also, you mentioned that you have been the in-house designer for 8 years.
Have you had problems like this with other projects?
I would speak to your supervisor about the written warning.
The process for revisions is:
The VP talks to my supervisor and tells her what changes she wants made to the current draft. My supervisor then relays those notes to me. I implement those changes and send a new draft to my supervisor, who goes over it with the VP. Rinse and repeat.
Unfortunately, all the meetings with my supervisor are done via video conference (Zoom) and changes are relayed verbally, sometimes worked out live via a screen share, so I don’t really have a paper trail of requested changes other than some notes I have scribbled down.
I do however have a history of pdfs to show each round of revisions, and I have been able to piece together a list of changes requested at each round. I have a meeting with the head of HR on Friday and intend to state my case. I would go directly to my supervisor/VP but frankly I don’t trust them at this point. After 7 straight years of ‘Above Expectations’ performance ratings, they just gave me a review of the lowest rating possible, full of the same type of illogical B.S. accusations. And followed it up with this ‘written warning’.
Just to give you an example of some of the requests:
-‘move the sidebar down’ (later, ‘move it back up’)
-‘add more color’ (later, ‘those color blocks are too heavy on the page’)
-‘add a photo to page 1’ (later, ‘remove the photo from page 1’)
-‘change that color from green to orange’, etc
It does seem illogical to penalize me for following directions. I didn’t make any mistakes or do anything other than what they asked for. This VP seems to be a micromanager, communicates to me through my supervisor via a game of ‘telephone’ and she’s turning me into a pixel pusher. Excessive revisions are on her when she keeps wanting to try different things and adds new instructions to each round of revisions.
I was actually asked to begin this project with ‘three different designs’ without being given the content or any direction. When I protested and asked for us to do a creative brief, I was written up for ‘not knowing how to do my job’ (“you should know how to do an Annual Appeal by now”) and classified as ‘resisting work.’
I think your diagnosis is dead-on, that the VP is trying to play art director without knowing what they want. I don’t think she is able to visualize things in her head until she sees them on screen/paper. It further complicates the process when I can’t deal with her directly.
Unfortunately there is no Art Director where I work - I am the only graphic designer and while my supervisor used to be the de facto AD, signing off on designs that I made, the VP has stepped into that role now. Neither of them come from a design background.
You’ve been there eight years. Why do you need a creative brief written by someone else to tell you how to do the sort of thing you’ve been doing for eight years. Write your own creative brief and run it by them.
You might not have the title to go with it, but from what you’ve described, it sounds like they’re expecting you to step up to the plate and serve as the equivalent of the art director without them having to tell you how to do your job.
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Why not? Have you been forbidden from talking to her directly? If so, maybe it’s time you had a talk with your supervisor — not to air grievances but to address the problem of needing to talk to the fundraising person directly.
I’m not there and have no clue other than what you’ve written, but have you considered that they’re asking you to work with them as an equal to figure out how best to do things. The writer you work with isn’t a designer. The fundraising person isn’t a designer, and she likely just wants materials that she feels will help her do her job.
She has fundraising experience, but not design experience, She needs your help and you need her help. Work together and figure it out.
I’ve worked with lots of fundraising people. They’re typically aggressive, a bit loud, and a little pushy, but that’s the kind of personality required to do their jobs. If that’s the case with this person, don’t let it intimidate you — work with her and bring your direct supervisor so she/he doesn’t feel left out.
Seriously, be proactive about this. You’re the designer and the de facto art director It sounds like they’re just asking for your help. You’re supposed to have the expertise to work with them as a partner where you all share your respective talents and experience to develop a product that accomplishes a goal. If it’s a fundraising goal, great — put your two heads together, share your collective expertise and come up with a winning solution. That’s what art directors do and, from what you’ve written, that’s what they need and are asking for.
After eight years at the same company, you should know the system inside and out, yet you’re sounding like you still want to be the new designer who needs guidance and hand holding from others. It sounds like they’re asking you for solid, convincing, well-reasoned art direction ideas and getting frustrated that you’re not rising to the task. So step up to the plate and do it! Work with them. Show you care. Show that you bring expertise to the table that will help them accomplish their goals. Argue your points — not defensively, but from the standpoint of you knowing what will work best. It’s a joint endeavor, so be their partner.
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Here’s what I do when I get instructions verbally at a meeting. I make notes. And before committing to any changes I email the team to say - please find below all the changes requested in the meeting, if there is anything else or something not right please let me know by amending the below.
Once I get the a-ok from this that’s when the work begins.
If doing changes over screen share - I relay the changes back to the person in email.
Always keep a paper trail. It’s saved me countless times.
We would store items in a warehouse, so there might be 250,000 leaflets stored in a warehouse for a year, nobody has seen the light of the day of these things.
Then somebody notices there was a change and the question comes back to me - why did you change that. Usually I remember the requested change or I don’t remember, that point is useless, but I have an email of every single exchange of round of changes.
Even a year later or two years in some cases I can say “Mr X” requested that change on the 11 November 2017 at 1.10pm.
No. 1 rule in this industry - cover your arse!
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While it sucks that your supervisor is so out of touch with your position, being victimized by that is partially on you if you allow it. Whether or not you can get the reprimand out of your record won’t be entirely up to you, but taking steps to prevent recurrence will be. Make it clear to your supervisor, HR, and the VP if possible, that you are deserving of more respect than has been demonstrated, and that you won’t have this. Assert yourself as the expert in your field and act, if necessary, as though they’d be dead in the water without you. Express your unemotional and unrelenting resolve to produce the best possible design product for the company no matter how many revisions it takes, and tell them straight out that quibbling over how many changes are too many is not only a waste of their executive time, but just as surely, beneath you.
You may not feel as though you’re in a position to be that assertive, but I’ve found that nearly always, people who push others around stop when someone pushes back. Others’ confidence in you must start with your own confidence in yourself. Years ago, I had some talks with a “career coach” that were largely about how to write a good resume and cover letter (and that stuff changes all the time), but at some point he threw in this: “Always be respectful…and act like you own the place.” Later he rephrased: “Don’t be arrogant, but leave no doubt that your role is crucial, and you own it.” Best advice I ever got, and it has been critical to survival in my current position.
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I’m glad I read this whole post. Honestly I needed to “hear” these two tidbits of advice for myself.
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Everybody’s raising good points, and I’d like to add my own two cents. It does seem odd to me to write someone up for too many revisions, when, if they were as you described, they weren’t related to any faults or mis-applications on your part.
What you described with the repeated revisions reminds me of some of the clients I’ve worked for. We’ve got a wide range, from Mom-And-Pop stores to big organizations who all have different standards, and some of them can be very micromanage-y. When I’m working on complicated jobs for those clients, we break the usual rule of “no client interacts with the designer” and set a time for them to watch me make changes live so they can see how the changes echo throughout the document and we can nail down exactly what they want, rather than going through the sales rep over and over again. This sort of approach sounds like it would have been better for your situation than what happened, especially since it sounds like this was a heavy redesign.
Consider asking your supervisor what an acceptable number of revisions would be on similar projects in the future - then when you reach a certain portion of that number on any project, you escalate to a similar method. Say he says five is the maximum, the next time you’ve done three and got revisions back, you start a Zoom call/screenshare with the person in charge of the project while you work on it. It is the sort of thing you have to schedule, and I imagine that a VP might not want to block an hour out to work on something they’re paying you to do, but if the message isn’t getting across the best way to address the issue is to establish a direct line of communication, and it usually saves everybody time in the long run. Say with that green to orange change, she could look at it and say “Hmm that green isn’t communicating what I want it to,” and you could respond by, in real-time, showing alternative swatches in the same place, instead of sending different revisions each time.
As far as the work situation goes, this is the kind of thing that can be the stretching pains as everybody gets used to each other - but it sounds like you might be having some other issues, so it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out for trouble and the other watching for a potential new roost. If an honest attempt to make things right doesn’t go well, your work environment might be shifting to the toxic side, and I personally wouldn’t want to stay in a place with that kind of energy.
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A lot of great points made!!
You definitely need to have your meeting with HR to get to the bottom of some of these issues and to see if it can be resolved.
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As soon as something’s elevated to HR, it turns into a formal process with lots of possible ramifications. It’s always an option, but it’s good to keep in mind that HR stands for Human Resources. In other words, most companies view their employees as needed resources that keep the company running.
Businesses set up Human Resources departments to manage the miscellaneous hassles associated with employees. Never forget that the Human Resources people work for the company, not for its employees. Their bias will always favor the company’s position.
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You make a very good point.
The second they renamed Personnel ,HR, you knew things were going downhill. Human Resources is such a dispassionate, almost inhumane term, the irony gets lost. Humans are not resources!
I called our HR department for this first time ever (worked here almost 4 years) and they came across as fairly cold. After discussing the reason I called, she asked me how my life was going, which seemed nice, but when I gave an answer (very brief description of one of my on-the-job woes) the response was basically “try harder”. Which lol I probably need to do to some degree, but at the same time…she asked seeming like she cared but in the end there was nothing caring about it. I got the sense that she was checking a gauge on a piece of equipment rather than asking me a question in a human sensitivity kind of way.
…and how does this rant benefit the OP…? I dunno.