John Karpinsky’s Guerra de las Galaxias – Star Wars Day of the Dead/El Diade Los Muertos prints

I just need to get some decent frames and stop trying to convince myself to try and make my own frames, it’s not worked out great so far.

I’d assumed I’d be able to dig out a handful of textures, patterns and shapes that I may be able to re-use or package up in some manner, I didn’t expect there to be quite so much. It’s all in a terrible mess. I have an awful habit of creating a pattern or template for one job and leaving it in that job’s folder so I’ll never find it again if I need it elsewhere. A couple of times in the past I’ve started trying to categorize items without much success. This time round I’ve created a categorized Dropbox folder to keep everything in (yes, it will be backed up somewhere non-cloud based).

I need to get into the habit of adding any re-usable asset to the library as soon as I’ve created it (rather than assume I’ll get round to it later). The big challenge is going to be going through the 50 Gig of designs I already have and extracting anything of value. To compound the lack of organisation many of the assets only exist within the designs themselves.

It’s quite nostalgic going through old work, especially the bits related to the record label, hopefully I’ll find something of use!

Spreadshirt has so far proved to be the easiest to use with helpful documentation, clearly defined guidlines and flexible setup. Zazzle is a little more confusing at first, but the ability to bulk create a whole bunch of products in one go (and no apparent limits on number of designs) makes it pretty attractive.

The stores are here: Zazzle and Spreadshirt

Here’s the robot:

Who doesn’t need a child’s t-shirt with a slightly worrying robot on the front?

I’m not really in a position to complain too much, I earn a relatively comfortable amount doing a job that imposes no serious health risks, nothing strenuous and is only as stressful as I let it be – which is pretty damn stressful but that’s my problem, not that of the industry. The issue is that as time goes on I’m working longer and longer hours for the same amount of money. I’m spending more and more time and cash ensuring I have the skills and the tools to keep my business in the position it’s in while I’m finding we are being squeezed more and more both creatively and financially.The bulk of the issues are down to how I run my business, mostly with managing expectations and having spent too many years accepting work of a type I should have passed on. While this is something I am addressing I also need to consider the long term implications of an income which is directly tied to the number of hours I can put in.

So, here I am with a big bucket of useful skills – pre-apocalypse anyway, I’ll be useless once the zombies take over – most of which I rarely use to their maximum effect, I have good a work ethic (possibly more ‘workaholic’) and the motivation to get stuff done. I’ve considered a complete career change but the responsibilities of mortgage and small child make this a very difficult choice. I’ve considered giving up on the self-employment lark and getting a proper job with security – as much security as this industry allows anyway – but again I can’t see a huge long term benefit. I have friends who have done as such and are generally no happier, with little more free time for family or personal interests (my real goal) and I just don’t have the lack of ethics or the desire to claw my way to the top and make the big money.

In this modern world of free and easy communication and commerce there are other options. An income methodology which is becoming increasingly alluring is that of the micro-business. Rather than concentrating on one big core business with big clients and big budgets the idea is to split your time amongst many smaller ideas, each of which can bring in a small amount of income so removing the reliance on any one client or business. This (in theory) allows for flexibility and fast evolution, one idea not doing so well? Kill it. Another idea doing better than expected? Feed it.

All fairly obvious for a large corporation but not something I would have considered for a small business or individual until fairly recently. About two years ago friends started telling me it’s what I should be doing. I did agree right away with the idea but have done nothing about it, mostly through fear of failure and because of workload but it’s time to give it a go. I have no expectations of making a massive change in the short term, and long term I fully expect to still be running my business – albeit in a more efficient and effective manner. I’m aiming for a better balance, if I can be in a position where I have income not linked to my primary business I will be more able to pick and choose the more creative or financially beneficial projects. I might also get the occasional guilt free holiday.

I’m not going to set any targets initially, it’s going to be an experimental and fairly organic process, I also don’t plan on buying any of the shonky looking books on the topic because there’s the worrying smell of snake oil self help around most of them. I will however be talking to friends and acquaintances who have already succeeded in getting off the ground. Wish me luck and I’ll try and keep you updated, also let me know if you have any experiences, good or bad with making a living like this.

It’s not just New Year, I feel like I spend most of my life trying to make major life changes, at any one time I’m trying to do any and all of the following: finally write an album, become good enough at illustration to produce a book, do something entirely different for a living, exercise more, eat better, spend less money, own less stuff, work more, go out more, spend more time with my family, spend more time with my friends, be more socially aware, be more politically aware, spend more time on my own (in a positive way), be smarter, be more organised, look after my car better, look after my house better, be more polite, sort out the crap in the attic (both metaphorically and literally), be more charitable, write three blog posts a week, spend a few hours a week out with my camera, learn to edit video properly, draw cartoons, accept more work and handle it better, finish/start all of the several thousand personal projects I’ve planned. Plus a host of other crap that bounces round my head on a near-constant basis.

Most of these things are not destined to happen, those that do, do so to such a small degree it’s immeasurable. Ennui may be a minor cause of this ongoing failure but the real root cause is there’s just too much to deal with. These self-defined expectations compounded with the those from external sources (clients, family, society, etc) become so overwhelming that rather than face any of them, my brain switches directly to standby. I’ve tried a handful of self-help books and techniques, all of which have been at best pointless, at worst they have intensified the shouting in my head. Anything promising a complete life change in 9 hours (or similar) do nothing more than add pressure and things to the big list of stuff to sort out.

I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s Help! in which he takes a skeptical and logical look at the self-help industry. I started reading it for entertainment value, but have learned a fair amount in the process. Primarily I have realised something which should be obvious, people (generally) cannot make huge changes to their lives in quick easy (or even hard) steps, it’s just not in our nature. Tiny incremental changes which over time can build up to make a difference are much easier to fathom.

No more big resolutions, no lists of major life changes, just try a little bit here and there as and when the opportunity arises.

Happy New Year.

x

I had completely forgotten about the ‘cold light of day’ issue that comes with any creative project, where you work hard into the night on the best track/illustration/whatever EVER only to find it’s a bucket of poo when you review it the next day. I’m not finding it too difficult to deal with this time round as I feel I’m making some real progress, I’ve also accepted that it is an important part of the learning process even if it’s a little cringe-inducing at times.

Learning music theory properly is one of the most inspiring experiences, although I’m disappointed I’ve not made the effort previously. The need to understand music theory appears to be fairly subjective, I’ve spoken to some talented musicians who claim to know no theory and in the past I’ve lazily tried to convince myself that I could be one of them. I’ve also realised how much I’ve tried to persuade myself that by writing ‘experimental’ music I could sidestep the effort involved in learning how to do things properly. The acceptance that I need a technical understanding of a subject before I can be creative with it has taken a long time to get to but I’m glad of it. I can’t state strongly enough how much difference a basic understanding of theory has made to me and I really wish I’d done this years ago. Music theory is good yeah!

I’ve been learning through a variety of sources, the best being Michael Hewitt’s Music Theory for Computer Musicians. I was a bit put off by the name expecting something a little reductive but it’s proved a brilliant introduction to theory, the book title could do without the ‘for Computer Musicians’ bit as the computer music side of things is minimal.

So, I’m getting there and hopefully soon will be able to translate the noises in my head into a format that other people can hear. I’ve got a Soundcloud account http://soundcloud.com/anxioussilence which I’m considering uploading some bits and pieces to once I’ve got the hang of structure a bit more. I am very wary of posting anything publicly as don’t really want (at this point) to encourage criticism because I am a delicate flower (who can’t be fucked with arguing with people on the internet). I’m also incredibly wary of any of my friends hearing any of my nonsense as many of them are incredibly talented musicians who may instantly hate me once they become aware of my utter lack of talent, on the other hand they might be astounded and instantly agree to form a world destroying industrial hip-hop band with me.

I’ve been self employed for the majority of my work life – since 1998. There are some benefits to this manner of working, there are also some disadvantages which can over time become hellish burdens if you allow them to, which on occasion I do. The real crux of self-employment is taking responsibility for your situation. It can be easy to allow a problem to recur, grow out of control and leave you blaming clients, suppliers or the industry as a whole – which is not to say that there are not problems caused by clients, suppliers or the industry as a whole, just that many are not or if they are can be solved relatively easily.

The biggest issue I deal with pretty much constantly is that of workload. Most freelancers/studio owners face this, you either have not enough work to cover the bills or so much you don’t know where to start and cannot cover it all. I’ve been consistently fortunate in the respect I’ve never really had a point where I’ve had a lack of work (for more than a day or so anyway). Unfortunately the offset of this is that combined with my slightly obsessive disposition I’ve had very little in the way of time off for the last 14 years. When I started out this was not a massive issue, I was ok to work late nights and most weekends, the last year (since my son was born) this has become more of an issue, I don’t necessarily have the long hours available to fit in and my priorities have changed.

Not enough to pay the bills?

Stating the stunningly obvious, the problem with a lack of work is the lack of income that comes with it. As mentioned above this is not a situation I have been in as yet. Ever aware that I inevitably will be one day I do have a basic plan in place for when this arises (although it does need some work). Regardless of how successful you feel you are right now it’s always sensible to be running some form of low level marketing – to keep in practice as much as anything else – and to have a plan in place for when things start to wane.

I’ve been pretty lax for the last decade or so, all of the work we’ve picked up has been through word of mouth so I’ve felt very little necessity to promote. This is bad on two levels, firstly because it means I’ve not got anything in place for when things do slow down but also as I’ve very little control over the direction of my business and effectively get dragged by the tide (more on this another time). I do now have a basic strategy in place for new business finding which I’m hesitant to present until I’ve had a crack at, as may be clear it’s not an area I have any great knowledge of.

There are plenty of articles/books/tutorials out there on business building and I’m not eager to add to them with my unproven technique, as an incredibly basic breakdown my strategy is pretty much:
1. Engagement
Both ‘real world’ and social media networking. Nothing more complex than communicating with those in our industry on a regular basis and making ourselves known through general purpose profile raising.

2. Being really quite good at what we do
Obvious? Maybe, maybe not. Just making sure we really do supply the best service we can.

3. Portfolio
Something we can throw out at prospective clients to show them how absolutely awesome we are. More important than some  think, it’s possible to land certain types of jobs with minimal discussion if your portfolio is spanking.

4. Self Initiated Projects
The sort of work I really want us to be doing is not necessarily the sort of work we are doing right now. We are very unlikely to pick up certain types of project if we don’t have a track record with them, rather than bemoan the Catch 22 situation this puts us in we will be doing ‘sample’ projects in these areas for ourselves (NOT for free for anyone, that gives out the very wrong message that we are cheap).

There’s one very important thing to bear in mind when trying to get in new business, especially when things are tight: DON’T PANIC. It’s very hard not to sometimes but as soon as you start on this path you’re going to end up making some horrific mistakes: accepting work you really shouldn’t, dropping your rates, etc.

To much to work out what’s going on?

My speciality is having far more work on than I can possibly handle. At the outset this sounds great and friends look at me like I’m mental when I bemoan having more work on than I can manage, but it can be as dangerous as having not enough to do, if not more so in some ways.

The primary issue with an overwhelming workload (aside from no sleep and an enforced diet of pizza and fried chicken) is ensuring a consistent quality of work. It’s easy to do things well when you have plenty of time and space but as timelines get tighter your ability to keep any eye on the details can drop dramatically. This can lead to unhappy clients, missed deadlines and general frowning all round. The other main business issue is lack of time deadens innovation. While I will accept that innovation can happen under pressurised circumstances often it does not. Rather than looking for fresh approaches to jobs when under pressure, you are more likely to be just knocking them out as quickly as possible using whatever methods you already trust. I find that the biggest breakthrough’s we have had are on projects (personal or paid) where we’ve had plenty of time and space to experiment. Lack of innovation will not necessarily damage your business but it’s not going to help you build your business to the next level.

Most obviously the immediate solution to a hectic workload is to employ more people to deal with it. This is a lovely theory that doesn’t always work out too well. For a small business, taking on salaried staff can be a killer, freelancers are a good solution if you are not in a position to salary staff. Regardless of where your help comes from you’re going to have to get them acquainted with your business practices, clients and projects, this in itself can eat an awful lot of time. The best approach is a little bit of forward planning. Start taking on freelancers when you don’t quite need to, this gives you that space to get to know them properly and work out the best way of working together, then when things kick off you already have the relationship sorted. Importantly don’t treat your freelancers like a commodity, foster a proper working relationship with a selection of freelancers who you will consistently supply work to. Anyone I hire freelance I’d be happy to have as salaried staff (and hopefully one day will).

Ensuring your rates are correct can be a very effective regulator of workload. In times past I’ve ended up with a massive overload of work much of which is low quality* and achieving little other than taking up time that should be spent on other projects. Setting appropriate costs has the positive effect of filtering out the time wasters and the crappy projects which you probably shouldn’t be doing anyway. It’s always good to be a little flexible and I will drop our rates (a little!) for the right project but very rarely and only if I’m 100% sure it’s not going to backfire on me. Often those who barter and knock you down the most will turn out to be the most difficult to deal with in the long run. As a rule it’s better to hold out for the higher paid/more rewarding, and less annoying projects if your situation allows.

Very close to ensuring correct rates, be picky about what sort of projects you accept. When I first started out this would have seemed irresponsible at best, the idea of turning away work is counterintuitive but can make sense. There are certain types of job that we’ve accepted in the past which have not been in line with our business model. Doing the odd bit here and there is fine but these things can snowball and you can end up having to completely redirect your business. This could work out if the new direction is one you are comfortable with and pays the bills well, but if not you need to do something about it. There’s a couple of options here. You can expand your business to include these projects (outsourcing is very much your friend here) in such a manner as to ensure you have the resources to continue pushing in the direction you want to go. My preference is to get to know other agencies who do cover the sorts of projects we would rather avoid. This allows us to redirect the projects elsewhere while keeping the client happy and helping out whoever we pass them onto. Good karma which should hopefully flow back our way in time. Of course there is the fear with clients for whom you do assorted projects that if you pass on one of them they may take everything elsewhere (as has happened to us before), this is a risk that needs to be considered carefully and would be best dealt with by accepting the projects but outsourcing.

Once again stating the obvious an incredibly important aspect of managing workload is effective time management and ensuring you are as organised as possible. An insane amount of time can be wasted by bad business practices, and you probably don’t even know you’re wasting it. I’ve had a degree of success with the Getting Things Done method although I have found a need to revisit it on occasion for a topup. The web is full of advice and applications to help get you organised and there’s absolutely no excuse not to. Regular review of your practices is strongly advised, it’s easy to slip into bad habits especially as your business grows and evolves.

Hopefully this helps to prevent a stress related breakdown for someone! I’d love to know how other small agencies and freelancers deal with long term excessive workloads. Please let me know in the comments below.

Disclaimer - I’m not a sociopath. I have a degree of concern for my fellow man and try and conduct my business in an ethical manner. I fully appreciate that if you take the ‘it’s just business’ point of view to running your commercial affairs you probably have none of the problems above and have slightly scarier solutions if you do.

* Low Quality Work = Work that is unlikely to lead to anything further and whose outcome is something that I wouldn’t want to let anyone know I’ve been involved in. Often happens when a client insists on doing things a certain way (the wrong way) and refuses to accept advice. Previously I would grit my teeth and think of the money, now I’m less inclined.

We were supposed to be visiting friends today but Alexander has been a little unwell (he’s actually much better today) and didn’t want to risk making him any worse so we canceled (sorry Max and Fi). My immediate thought was to spend the day writing WordPress plugins but considered that my nearly-wife would probably kill me in the face so opted for the more family friendly option of harvesting some stuff from the garden.

We usually make a sort of effort to freeze a bulk of the apples but don’t do that with the pears as they are a pain in the arse to freeze (you need to cook them first), so opted to make pear jam instead. Did two batches based on this Pear and Lemon jam recipe we split it into two batches, one of which we followed the recipe and the other we added some stem ginger in syrup. We thought this would supply us with some gifts for Christmas, I hadn’t realised that 2 kilos of pears makes about 4 medium jars of jam. I managed to burn it (along with my hand) a bit as well so probably best we keep it for ourselves.

It was fairly straight forward, although I fucked up a bit by trying to make jam, freeze herbs, prepare apples and pears for freezing (made the effort to freeze some pears this time) and make pear muffins all at the same time. Nothing went horribly wrong but there were some moments of flailing and disharmony within the kitchen.

Lessons learned today are to do one thing at once, especially if two of the things you are doing you have never done before; wasps like pear trees, they don’t like you being in pear trees; spending the morning in a pear tree makes me itchy; I really shouldn’t have recycled that big bag of jam jars the other week.

We now have a kitchen full of tasty fruity goodness.

Three of the things I most want to do with my life are art, photography and music, not for profit or the adoration of others (although both would be a pleasant bonus) but for my own enjoyment. I have as yet failed to do much of any of these. I had a brief spate of success with photography – success in the sense that I actually did some, rather than I was a successful photographer – which I put down more to the enthusiasm of my good friend Scott (a very talented photographer) with whom I used to make many trips to explore and photograph things. Unfortunately a change my life circumstance have made it increasingly difficult to find time out for such trips and I can’t seem to get up the enthusiasm for the art on my own at home (a poor excuse).

The primary issue I have is that I just don’t know how to write music, I don’t quite get the creative process and as such am afraid of mediocrity and failure, although as with any other art form failure and mediocrity must be part of the process, very few (if any) are able to pick up a skill and be stunning at it straight off, you need to fail to learn and be a bit shit before you can be less shit.

An important part of any creative process (for me) is the social side, having people you can learn with and from. The times I’ve been most active have been when I’ve been spending plenty of time with proper musicians, most notably Nick Reincarnationfish -  who introduced me to the software I love (Reason and Ableton Live) and also to an awful lot of the music that has inspired me over the years. Nick has unfortunately and selfishly moved to Leeds which prevents my easily hanging around his flat making unpleasant noises. There are plenty of online locations for the socially impoverished to knock about ideas and techniques, but frankly I’ve always found them to be a bit intimidating and scathing to the uninformed (me).

Recently my relationship with writing music has changed for the better. Some friends had some ideas for a small musical project which I’m helping out with, this has instantly highlighted how fucking awful I am at writing music, but also given me the impetus to start learning properly. In the past I avoided the need to actually learn and understand by insisting on writing impenetrable experimental noise and shitty remixes (which I shall not be posting online), to be fair to myself, I was interested in writing impenetrable experimental noise so it’s not all bad. When sitting down to write something a bit more straight forward – you know, choruses, verses, drums, bass and lead – I have not a clue where to start, but that’s fine I’ll start at zero and work my way up. I’ve shed the fear of mediocrity, I know everything I write initially will be shit, I just won’t play it to anyone.

One of the big setbacks I’ve had to deal with is my workaholism. Having spent years with the mindset that if I’m awake I should be working and if I’m awake and not working I’m worrying that I’m not working has made it difficult to do anything that I cannot tie directly to work. I’m working (haha) on this and intend to be 40% less mental by the end of the year. I’m currently forcing myself to spend an hour a day doing something creative which is not work related. This generally happens about midnight when sleep would be more sensible but it’s a step.

This has all caused me to become stupidly excited about the forthcoming release of the next version of Reason . I absolutely love Reason, and Propellerhead in general, their attitude to their customers has always been fantastic, as displayed in their current Pay What You Want deal. I’ve always had this awful habit with Reason (and Ableton Live) of upgrading to the latest version, playing with it for a few hours  and then ignoring it until the next version comes out. I’ve been fighting this with my sudden massive geek love for James Bernard whose blog and tutorials manage to be exciting, interesting and not at all elitist or condescending. I’ve learned more about sound design and production in the last week than in the entire previous 35 years (thanks James).

So, maybe this year I’ll finally write that album I keep promising myself.

(I am aware that this blog is increasingly a blog of excuses for not doing creative things rather than a blog about the creative things I have done. I am very aware of this.)

I intended to write a wry article on identifying who your good clients are, I still might, but I have been distracted by the absolute horror of the last few months during which the stresses of work have increased to an all encompassing degree and had a huge detrimental effect on many aspects of my life, included my mental health. So that’s nice, it should make for an entertaining blog if nothing else.

Around the middle of last year I identified the direction I wanted to take my business based on it’s (any my) strengths, advice from associates and general consideration of what makes us the most profit based on the least stress and gives us the widest scope for creativity. The general idea was to aim for smaller high quality creative projects and start to cut out the large scale pure application programming jobs, mostly because they were just not profitable but also because they tend to be incredibly dull with no opportunity for creative input and drag on until everyone involved hates each other. You get the work you do. The plan was to outsource the work we were not specialising in and over time expand enough to bring in staff to cover it. This was to be beneficial to our regular clients as it meant more time and attention for them.

The majority of our regular clients are brilliant. Lovely people with good businesses who are great to work with. We do sometimes have clients who will make life difficult for us or projects that get a little out of control and eat more time and resources that expected but it’s rare that these things are of such a scale that they have a noticable effect on the business as a whole, we just have to work a few more hours a week and spend a bit more time swearing at the internet. Last year three hit at the same time, the aftershock is still battering me.

The first of the triad of hellish projects was just unfortunate, and as such I’m not going to talk about it, it was bad planning on the part of the client but it was sorted out without any unpleasantness, I only mention it as it exploded at the same time as the other two horrific situations, which were as follows…

The Dangerously Angry Client

I should have seen this coming a mile off, but I didn’t because I’m an idiot. A previous client approached us to do a couple of new websites for his business and a business he was involved with. I was initially very wary as he has been a little difficult in the past (nothing major) and had been very slack about paying invoices, in fact he still owed us for a job we had done 18 months previously. After allowing myself to be talked round to working for him we presented initial costs, which were fairly low for the sites he wanted. Not happy, he wanted to pay half what we were asking. This is the point I should have really walked away. I didn’t, I am a sucker. We agreed that although we wouldn’t drop our costs we would work out how to do the work to the budget he required (not something I would usually consider as it becomes near impossible to do a decent quality job) by cutting out parts of our service such as copywriting, photo sourcing, etc. The most important part that would be cut out (at his request) was design options. He decided he wanted a single style put together for the site and was insistent that he would be happy with it regardless. My designer was wary at best. I should have walked away. So, in summary the client had pushed for and agreed for a cut down service, he was fully aware of the level of service we could supply for the budget he had. We agreed that we would not start the work until he had paid outstanding invoices for all previous work and a deposit for each of the new sites. This was agreed fair by both parties.

So, we waited and got on with other work. A couple of times the client contacted us to ask how it was going and I’d explain we hadn’t started and wouldn’t do so until he had paid up as previously agreed. Things started to get a little tense, there were some important dates for his business coming up which required the website to be online and he was getting pressure from the other business he was involved in as to where the hell their website was. Eventually the payment came in and we got started. Communications by this point were pretty tense. To make the situation worse the client was now overseas somewhere with a minimal internet connection and pretty much no phone signal. He was clearly having trouble understanding emails but there was no other way we could communicate, contact essentially consisted of demands to get the work done by the important dates, which were very close. One of the sites had a fairly complicated structure due to the business having two not quite complementary sides to it, trying to get this across and a sensible solution worked out proved a challenge.

We managed to get the designs sorted and over to him before any of us had a full on breakdown. The design for the ‘other business’ was signed off instantly with a fairly complimentary email. The second he was more unsure of, although not entirely negative. Sensing he was unhappy with the design we suggested we consider an alternative (regardless of having agreed to a single design per site only), this was declined as the project was now ultra-mega urgent. Both designs were signed off to be built.

We went away and built the sites. The ongoing communication issues made this a little tricky but not impossible. The sites were now up. We could relax.

We could relax, for about three hours. This is where the bad really started. A day or so later I started getting seriously worrying emails from the client late at night about how massively unhappy he was with his website. Long, scary emails telling of how we were ruining his website and what “shit” we had given him, what awful people we were for daring to supply this dreadful service. Nothing specific, no information about what he didn’t like about his website just that he hated it and all his friends hated it and it was shit and awful and he was despairing about what to do. What to do? What should he do? Ah, that’s right, return to this country and get a bit threatening. Soon enough the emails were joined by their dear friends, the passive aggressive phone calls (with the balance more on the aggressive).

Some context. At this point in time I was already overwhelmed with the other problem client who I shall get to soon, also my lovely son had just been born. Things were pretty strained and I was exhausted.

After a fair amount of what by now was just outright bullying my tired brain could take no more and I agreed to completely redesign and build his site from scratch for no extra charge if he would just stop it with the heavy phone calls. I had a quick discussion with him over what he expected and put together a generic design and applied it to the website (we use an in-house website framework so we can just drop a new design over the top of an existing site). To get him out of my hair I had completely re-arranged my schedule to get this turned around in a day. Phone rang, assumed it would be a relatively grateful client. No. It was time to yell at me over how the hell could we charge so much for websites when I had just created one in less than 8 hours. Tried to explain that it was because the new one was not designed to requirements, it was just a generic template and that most of the heavy lifting had been done when we had put together the first version. Failed to explain the concept of templates to the client because I was FUCKING EXHAUSTED by this point. He wanted to know why he couldn’t have some money back since it clearly only took us a couple of hours to create a website from scratch.

Now we were not only “shit” we were also “cowboys” and “rip-off merchants”. So that was nice. He was now happy with both websites if not how much he had paid for them. Should have left it there? Probably. Didn’t though. As part of the service he had asked us to supply a regular review of the performance of his site (I would like to state we did not sell this to him, he asked). The service is a standard monthly report, you get the first one a month after site launch. Five days into site launch he’s on the phone asking where the damn monthly report is. This confused me. The demands for the report to be supplied NOW continued over the next few days until we gave in and just supplied it half a month in.

Here’s where the wrongness stepped up a level. In the report we identified a couple of areas of the project that could be improved on. Nothing mission critical, things that would generally be picked up prior to launch but hadn’t been as launch had been rushed through. This is the purpose of a report, to pick up on how the site is doing and how it can be improved. Nothing in the report indicated that we would charge for fixing the MINOR issues (we wouldn’t have). Another shouty phone call later about what awful fucking shit cowboys we were, with suggestions that we had deliberately added problems to the site so we could charge to fix them.

See, I don’t need this shit, I’m pretty good at my job and as explained above have enough good clients with good relationships to make a decent living. This client had insisted he wanted to use our services and no-one else’s – I had at least twice suggested he go to cheaper agencies and supplied him with a list. I had decided weeks previously that we would absolutely not be working for him again, I had already let him know we would not be able to do another project he had sent our way – which confused the fuck out of me, why would you continue to send more work to the shit cowboys who are apparently fucking you over? Really? We of course had some ongoing ties to him through updates to the website plus hosting/domain names, we had canceled the monthly reports. It was going to be a challenge to shift him entirely to another agency and I just didn’t want any further contact. But then…

A ray of light? Maybe? He was so sick to death of us and our horrific rip-off service he had decided to get a “mate who is a professional web designer and will do the site for free” to take over. Well done that mate. Would this make things better, would he go away and stop intimidating me? Would he fuck. I spoke to his ‘mate’ who seemed a little guarded about the whole deal but agreed (with a bit of persuasion) to take over control of all of the client’s hosting accounts and domains. Relieved I emailed both the client and his ‘mate’ to finalise everything, explained how the mate now had control of everything and we could no longer access anything so couldn’t be held responsible for any problems.

Peace and relief at last. No more threatening calls no more emails. For a couple of days. Turns out the mate hadn’t been quite the experienced professional he claimed and had managed to take down one of the websites. Not our problem? Remember the email explaining we couldn’t access anything and no longer had any responsibility over the websites? Well the client didn’t. Turns out mate decided to cover his own arse by pointing the finger at us saying we had taken the website down and he couldn’t do anything about it (he had broken the DNS records). The reaction..

THE REACTION, the reaction, the reaction to the website going down? Reasonable? Polite phone call? No. This was a saturday so wasn’t answering the phone first thing, what with new baby and a fairly unpleasant few weeks I had a lie in. I think that’s fair. No. No it isn’t. The reaction was to leave a voicemail (and and accompanying email) which consisted of shouting my home address followed by an indirect threat to send round someone to sort me out. At my home address. Client was aware of new baby. Did I mention this was Christmas week? No. This was Christmas week, with a new baby in the house and client was leaving voicemails threatening to send round unpleasant men to have a “discussion” with me. Made my own angry call back at him during which when asked if by “send people round to have a discussion” he meant “commit acts of violence against me and my family” he confirmed that was exactly what he meant and that was “how he does business” (don’t forget this was all over a FUCKING BUDGET WEBSITE). So, anyway, he refused to believe that we hadn’t killed his website as an act of malice and that it was the fault of his idiot friend but we came to the (incredibly angry) agreement that if I fixed his website he would go away and never contact me again in any form whatsoever. Website was fixed and barring some minor shitty emails he has now gone away and will hopefully never return. I did phone the police immediately after the phone call to him and they were incredibly supportive and helpful and took the whole thing very seriously (I have a harassment case against him which is suspended unless he ever contacts me again in which case I will absolutely be getting it moved forwards).

In short. Client unhappy with budget website makes serious threats of violence. Ridiculous situation and almost funny (will probably be fucking hilarious in a years time). Took me a while to regain composure and was generally unhappy about leaving nearly-wife and child alone for a good few weeks afterwards, not that I’d be fuck all use as anything apart from a meaty shield. As part of the “never contact me again” agreement I have agreed not to name the client, and I won’t, more for my own safety/sanity than anything else.

Christmas over, unpleasant man gone away time for some rest?

The Stupidly Complicated Overrunning Project of Complete Confusion

No, resting not allowed. At the same time as the unpleasant situation above was rolling to it’s unpleasant finale another project was going from being ‘a bit tricky’ to ‘fucking hell’ but in a very different manner.

In a perfect world I’d get to pick and choose which projects I/we accept and would never have to work on projects which I knew would be painful from the outset. It’s not a perfect world. Sometimes a client will come up with a project that is a little outside of our area and definitely on the list of jobs we would rather avoid, but we will be given the option of accept the project or lose all their business. Also, sometimes a client will insist that a project is carried out by us and not outsourced or handed over to people they have no prior experience of. This project covered both of these situations.

The project itself is a large, incredibly complicated application for a company who’s industry is notorious for strict and very complicated legislation. We were first brought in to discuss it a couple of years back, following which there were a couple of days consultancy here and there to look at how long it would be likely to take and what would be involved. After the last consultancy my advice was that it would need about six to nine months to complete, assuming that nothing major changed and that we were given fair warning to clear some space for it. For a while we heard nothing more. Then around about August we were called in to see the client and given until the end of December to complete the project. For another month or so we couldn’t start as we were waiting for information and sign-off from the client. By the time information, contracts and sign off were supplied we had four months to complete a (minimum) six month project including testing while already dealing with a heavy workload. Not helped that it was holiday season so we had extended periods where people involved were unavailable for a couple of weeks at a time.

The scale of the project was not what turned it into a Kafkaesque nightmare (although it didn’t help). It was the mind numbing circular horror of it all that drove me to a point where I felt a minor accident would be light relief. Firstly it was the number of people involved, we all know that design by committee is generally a terrible thing to be avoided, but design of a relatively complex financial application for a complicated industry by committee takes things to a new level. The actual client was generally ok and had a single person heading the project who could make final decisions on anything coming from within their organisation (and did so very very efficiently), it was the mass of government bodies and associated organisations all of whom had a say in the project but none of whom apparently communicated with each other in any form who made it difficult going. Often we would finish a chunk of the project only to be told we had to roll back and start again because some chap from some legal department somewhere had been on holiday when that aspect had been discussed and had since returned and introduced some additional layer of legal complexity to how it was managed.

Despite clear explanation that we did not have an encyclopeadic knowledge of the client’s industry and as such would need to be informed of anything that may possibly affect how we put it together we increasingly discovered that this was ignored and that again, after completing a large section of work we would need to either roll back entirely or make major adjustments due to some minor bureaucratic technicality which we had been utterly unaware of but the client had known all along and had assumed was obvious – as is often the case when you know a subject so well. This happened a lot.

The client had some troubles with the development process as well, perhaps in this case we should have clarified the importance but we didn’t and we made the assumption that everyone involved understood the purpose of signing off and testing. As there was a fair degree of R&D in the project (something the client & extended agencies also had trouble understanding the nature of) we didn’t have a single overriding spec (well we did but it was killed within the first fortnight), so we would spec up particularly important or complicated parts of the project and get them signed off before we carried them out. This could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, it would generally involve us discussing the aspect at length, writing out a spec explaining in English exactly what we would do, sending it to the client, discussing it with the client, asking them to read and review it and get back to us. Generally the client would sign off very quickly with no changes, which seemed nice, until it became clear the client was just not reading them because they didn’t have the time or couldn’t understand the purpose. The byproduct of this was of course roll-back and rewrite large chunks of project (again).

I have no problem with a long term R&D project, I’ve been involved in a few and the end result has generally been pretty good. I don’t think anything mission critical should be rushed, it should be developed within a sensible timeframe and carefully tested. Of course the problem with this is that someone needs to pay for the process. A couple of months past deadline now things were starting to go a little wonky, the project was eating all of our time to the detriment of work for other clients. We decided we couldn’t afford to continue to dedicate the time we had been to it any longer, bear in mind that at this point the majority of the work was scope creep in the form of new requirements and constantly redoing previous work in view of the problems described above. We were going to go to the client and suggest we dedicate a certain number of hours a week to their project so that we could work for others and not destroy our business. The client had other ideas and had concluded that we were too far over deadline and that we needed to step it up and work harder. Regardless that the reasons for the timeline were out of our control it was now our problem to deal with (there was a fair degree of internal politics involved here which I’m not going to discuss). To make things a little worse they also stated they they didn’t feel they should pay outside of the original cost which we were now well over (this is still in discussion).

Things switched pretty much overnight from being trying but amiable to cold and distressing. The calm lack of concern over deadlines was replaced with comments about how unhappy they were with how they had failed to meet their deadlines (bear in mind at this point that according to the timeline I had proposed we were not over deadline, we would have been pretty much dead on schedule). There were no specific threats but plenty of suggestions of repercussions if we didn’t hit the deadlines of the new timeline that the client defined (without any input from us). A decision was also made that we now had to submit twice weekly progress reports to the client explaining exactly what we had done over the last couple of days, attempts to explain that this would just slow down the process even more were met with indifference. Thus, rather than cutting back on time to allow for other clients we ended up having to pretty much cut out all other work and concentrate solely on this one constantly shifting project.

It’s nearly over now. Assuming the client doesn’t pull out any more major changes we are done aside from a handful of minor fragments of functionality we should be able to walk away in a couple weeks, well nearly, we’ll need to support the product for it’s life, so that will be lovely for all involved, considering faking my death. I am aware that it could still go mental again but hopeful that it will not.

Where am I?

The net effects of the last year have not been great. The effect on my business has been pretty awful, an understandable loss of faith from the majority of clients which is going to take some effort to win back. We’ve missed the opportunity on some really good projects. We’re currently about two to three months behind on pretty much everything that’s not related to the hellproject. Fortunately, as mentioned before we have some truly lovely clients with whom I’m been absolutely honest about the situation and as such they have been very supportive, which is hugely appreciated.

The effects on my mental health have been far worse. From a general shitty depression to intensifying paranoia it’s been a hilarious ride. Times usually put aside for personal creative projects have been replaced with lying down unable to consider my poor abandoned sketchbook & camera. Anxiety attacks when the phone rings or I need to check my email, coupled with obsessive email checking (even at 3 in the morning). Fluctuating insomnia which in turn beats the depression in that little bit harder. Recently (hilariously) I’ve found that any contact with anyone with the same first name as anyone on the hellproject team has made me stupidly twitchy. My social life has flatlined, although I am very grateful to friends who have been supportive. I did pick up a slightly odd habit of buying toys for a few weeks, I have an office full of action figures, fortunately this appears to have stopped again now.

It’s all been a bit poor overall, I think my inability to work on anything of my own has been the most upsetting outcome of the whole bucket of cocks.

If life throws buckets of shit at you, learn to duck

There is a positive outcome to all this nonsense in the form of a harsh learning experience. I’m fully aware that this has been entirely my own fault, I was aware at the start of both of these projects that we should absolutely not be touching them but in both cases I allowed myself to get talked into doing them. I’ve been woken up to the reality that in many ways I’ve been doing it wrong. I’ve already made some major changes to how I do business and there’s more to come. Primarily I need to be more assertive, not just with jobs I don’t want to accept but with any project which is not going in the right direction, there’s no long term benefit to putting out below par work, it gives no job satisfaction and acts as a shitty advert for my services, if I’m in a situation where the client or another team member is putting the quality of the project at risk I need to be making major noise. Making time for friends and family must become a priority, alongside ensuring I have time for my own projects and for keeping up to date with the industry and current techniques. One irritating side effect of the last few months is I’m fairly out of date with social media and web development. Making time for my own projects has always been an important part of the creative process, it’s during these that I generally learn new tricks and get a chance to improve my skills without a deadline or a budget.

I’ve had the opportunity to seriously evaluate my career and how I deal with people to ensure I never get in this situation again. The phrase “it’s just business” has been repeatedly forced on me, it’s bullshit and I’m not going to accept it. There’s no solid argument for me accepting work that will detriment the quality of my work as a whole, it’s bad for my existing clients and it’s bad for me in that the quality of my portfolio will drop. As Spock said, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, I’m not sure he had web design in mind but it works.

Am I sharing too much?

I verge on the cautious when vomiting my inner daemons onto the internet, it’s all too easy to open the door to a whole range of horrors, there’s a chance I may delete this within minutes of uploading it. I wanted to write this for a few reasons. Firstly as an attempt at catharsis, to help me move on from the bullshit and clear my head. I thought it might be sensible to put it down to point friends towards when the somewhat regular question of “where the hell have you been and why do you look like a recovering crackhead” comes up. Mostly as a warning to others, I’ve seen friends and colleagues get into similar situations, I don’t think without the benefit of foresight that many people are aware of quite how badly a freelance job can go, and the awful situations you can end up in. Not all jobs are equal, if you really think a project is going to go badly from the off it’s best to run away, a ‘bad’ job can be incredibly damaging.

Moving on, hopefully the worst is now over and self-repair will start to kick in properly soon. I’m going to draw stuff, photograph stuff and write awful industrial hip-hop, or I might just sleep for a while.

If you have found this moderately entertaining, can I recommend you visit Clients from Hell it will come as no surprise that many people have sent me there in recent times.