In our weekly installment of Clients from Hell, a hilarious collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from designers, we present “Shiny and Chrome.” For previous posts, click here .
My client is a publically traded American company with subsidiaries in other countries. The parent company’s logo is a patriotic red, white, and blue design.
The CEO took a trip to visit one of the subsidiaries. Installed in their lobby was a 3D chrome metal version of the logo. It looked gorgeous.
Normally, the CEO is a reasonable guy, but severe pressure from stockholders throws good sense out the window. The stockholders fell madly in love with the chrome logo, so he called me.
Client: They converted the logo to chrome down here. It looks amazing. I want to convert all our logos to chrome.
Me: That’s great and I’m sure it looks wonderful, but we can’t change the logo to chrome. First, chrome is not an Internet color, so we’d have to pick a shade of grey. Second, there is no chrome PMS color. We’d have to pay a premium to print all stationary and marketing materials with a silver foil. That added cost will be way above budget. You could go a little cheaper with a metallic ink, but that won’t look chrome. Or you could pick a grey PMS color. So do you want to change the logo to grey or keep it red, white and blue?
Client: I want it to be chrome and I don’t want to use any special printing.
