In-House Designers: 37 Ways to Get Fired

Piss Off Your Clients

When they call, don’t answer the phone. Leave messages only when you know they’re not there. Don’t respond to e-mails and don’t talk to them when you see them in the halls. Never, ever have lunch with them.

2. Be rude and abrupt in the few communications you do have with clients.
Don’t use proper salutations in your e-mails. Don’t say please or thank you. Keep your sentences short and grammatically incorrect, and add numerous misspellings, lest they think you care enough about them to use spell check. Never sign your e-mails or leave your contact info in a voicemail. Bonus tip: Eat and type on your keyboard while you’re on the phone.

3. Interrupt your clients when they’re giving you direction or feedback.
Know they have nothing of value to offer. If they do get a word in, shoot them a disdainful and dismissive look.

4. Miss deadlines. Need I say more on this point?

5. Say no as much as possible. Never say yes—just sigh and, if they happen to be in the room with you, roll your eyes for added effect.

6. Bad-mouth your clients to others in your company. Complain that they don’t understand design and that they’re control freaks (which you, of course, are not).

7. Don’t ever try to assist your clients with issues outside of design. If they don’t understand the routing or review process, don’t explain it to them. If they don’t know how to issue a purchase order for your outside vendor, never let on that you have the document from finance that explains how. It’s not your job to help them in these areas.

8. When something goes wrong on a project, never accept responsibility for it. Do your best to make it the client’s fault.

9. Talk to your clients like you would talk to your friends at a party. Address them as “dude.” Mumble, ramble and speak in one-word sentences. You shouldn’t have to change who you are by speaking their language—you’re a designer, not a suit!

10. Don’t give the client what they asked for. Go off brief: It was wrong, anyway.

11. Throw around lots of design terms that they don’t understand. It’s not your problem if they don’t know kerning from leading. Aren’t they in marketing? Didn’t they learn anything about design in business school?

12. Don’t design effective pieces for clients you don’t like. They don’t deserve the best of your talents and neither does the company for being stupid enough to have hired them in the first place.

13. Be late to meetings—all the time. Better yet, don’t go at all. Meetings are a total waste of your time.

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