me, Ariel, and the designer

This anecdote is too sweet not to share it with you. And it also contains a message...

You might know, I do freelance iPhone application development. And in this particular case I was hired by a company that had sold the whole package like marketing and development to a client, who wanted to have a cookbook made. And obviously I will not disclose who is who. But the players are: me and my company contact who hired me vs. the cook and the designer. But the original contract was between the cook and my company contact, which I will call Mr C. from now on. After quite some back and forth, the design schemes arrived at my desk, containing all the images, the recipes and a description. You must know, that I assemble everything, write the code, and make the final product. I am not supposed to do the design, hence the designer. Simply put: I am not supposed to touch photoshop. I made the app, made screenshots, we had a video presentation, the cook was happy, I was happy, Mr C. was happy 3 2 1 Launch! The app was out.

Where is the funny part you might ask? And here it came: 4 weeks after launch Mr C. gets this email with fixes he should do immediately because apparently the app was all wrong... At least that is what the designer said. We were puzzled, she supplied the content, the images, everything, how could this be wrong? After digging into this matter, we found this pdf file containing a sketch of the app, where the designer made arrows to icons saying: Beveled, with shadow! So instead of making the images correct, she just said how they were supposed to look. (little explanation here: beveled for her was the aqua look that all your application icons on the iPhone home screen have, this little white gradient, that makes them look pretty).

Besides that she had no idea how the beveled look was made, that the iPhone does that automatically for the home screen, but not inside the application, and that even after asking her she refused to make the modifications, instead she pointed out that the font we used was all wrong...

And this is the moment where I loose my patience. I can take criticism very well, but only if it is constructive... she just said wrong, and not how it was supposed to look. How can I fix something when I don't know how it is supposed to look. Still in a very polite manner, I wrote back asking:"What font do you want - Arial, Helvetica, Apple System Font?"

We got a response pointing out that Ariel might be the best design... You see the difference Ariel - Arial, one is a font one is a mermaid, and that is no typo "I" is quite far from "E" on the keyboard.

What do we learn from this?

-If you hire a designer, and I know a lot of people who do great work, make sure this person in qualified. We have in house designers, that do the things they are supposed to do. Why hire someone else if his job was already taken?

-If you are the boss, make sure that in the review process, everybody who has a say, gets a chance to actually review

-Read your emails at least once, after you wrote them

-If you give feedback, always be constructive. If you say wrong you must say how it is right in the same sentence

-And most importantly: The designer is supposed to design, he/she has to deliver all the artwork, not a comment about how the art is supposed to look. Everybody can say: "Make her have this amazing mysterious smile" - but only one guy can paint the Mona Lisa.

 Cheers Arend