Murphy’s law applied to design
If you’ve been on the Internet for a while, chances are that you know what “Murphy’s laws” are, for other Wikipedia is here to help you. If you’re too lazy to click on the previous link, Murphy’s law pretty much states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.
Based on my own design experience, I share here some Murphy’s laws that relate to design, please add your own in the comments.
If you have 10 minutes to print some work before meeting your client, the printer will go out of ink.
When the printer goes out of ink and you are in a rush, you don’t have any cartridges to replace it.
No matter what the size of the logo is, it’s not big enough for your client.
If your WordPress theme validates, you’ll install a plugin that breaks the validation.
If you have a lot of work, a client you didn’t hear of for years will call you and be in a hurry.
If you don’t make your website work in IE6 before showing it to your client, he will be using IE6.
Amen to this: If you don’t make your website work in IE6 before showing it to your client, he will be using IE6.
If you show a client 2 designs you love and one you are not really happy with, he/she will pick the one you don’t like!
Great post
Here are a couple of mine:
~ The time you need to launch a new site like yesterday, will be the one time it takes the whole 48 hours for the domain name to resolve.
~ If it’s the most beautiful WordPress theme you ever made, the client will write one blog post a year.
~ And the client who says they don’t know what they want is telling the truth: but they sure as heck know what they don’t want – exactly what you just made them. (“Did I not mention I hate orange?”)
With clients, design is all about clearing up all the “grey areas” in your meetings.
Grey areas might be:
> color scheme
> typeface
> price for monthly updates or hourly updates
> etc.
Just sponge everything the client wants and make it happen
How about this one:
You made a website for a client (your best work ever) and you used beautiful stock photography as a temporary fill an the client replaced the photos with their own snapshots
Been there, Leon. Now I make it my task to sell the client on the joys of stock photography
lol
If you don’t make your website work in IE6 before showing it to your client, he will be using IE6.
it’s true, one of these days I was working in a web site for a big client, the site, worked in Firefox, IE 6,7,8, but it wasn’t rendering the right way on webkit based browsers, so I relax and go to the meet with the client, thinkin her uses IE6, when I asked her to enter the website in the testing server I almost has a stroke, she was using Google Chrome…
but now the problem was corrected and everybody is happy with the results of the work.
after you finished a great design your client says why did you leave this empty space? fill it with anything!