In our weekly installment of Clients from Hell, a hilarious collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from designers, we present "We want exactly this." For previous posts, click here.
I was hired to design a label for a small craft brewery’s new range of ales. They sent along some reference material from another label with the brief: This is pretty much exactly what we want .
I submitted three concepts with varying degrees of similarity to the reference example, and they selected the one most similar to the example.
After a couple of rounds of changes, we were about to go to print when I received a panicked email from the client with the EXACT same image they sent me as reference.
Client: We were looking around online and found this existing label and it looks exactly like our new one! We can’t use our new design now! How did you think you could get away with trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own?!
Needless to say, I haven’t done any work for them since.
