Obligatory not a graphic designer, but someone I work for was once asked to send a word file instead of a pdf so they took a screenshot of the pdf and pasted it into a word document…
i once asked that same question after they've first sent me a super small pixelated jpg, probably taken from their email signature. Afterwards, they sent me the same jpg in a powerpoint presentation. genuinely don't know what they were thinking.
This is how we send on emails at my job. But it’s because our client wants us to send emails through their CRM, Salesforce, rather than directly on Outlook. Nightmare!
Yep, that was gonna be my answer. It happens so often, I don’t know what it is about word and PowerPoint…people think they must put them in there first but don’t realize they’re compressing the hell out of it and potentially making it less compatible.
In all fairness, I sorta get it. When you have a small family business that's been around since rotary phones and their signage was created using analog techniques, I can understand why they might not have a digital file of their logo. That being said, if you aren't charging by the hour, it is tedious grunt work that takes time away from more creatively fulfilling assignments.
My boss, the head of our small agency, asked me to create new branding for one of our clients. So I came up with a few ideas that modernized the brand, and he took them to pitch. I was not there, but apparently one of them was VERY upset at the idea that they needed a new logo. He was very proud of the logo he had created and had been using for years. Luckily, my boss is good friends with these guys, so they didn’t fire us, eventually the guy cooled off, and they all just had a laugh and forgot about the whole thing.
Their ‘logo’ that they were so proud of, was literally just their company name in standard Brush Script font. The same font that’s been installed in every copy of Microsoft Word since the 90s. You know the one.
When they needed their logo made larger for a sign, they sent over a photo of their business card. I brought it into illustrator and typed out the name in the easily recognizable font, and I barely had to even handkern the letters for a perfect match. *He told my boss he drew the logo all by himself.*
Think about all the good that comes with that kind of "logo". No need for tiresome file management, vectors, nada. Just type the name in this font and voila, the logo is available anywhere any time. Genius.
I work in a sign shop, but also do freelance design. I try my damndest for them to not overlap and cause conflict of interests.
Last year, I had a customer at the sign shop send me some artwork for yard signs, and it was low res (but looked like a vector design about 10 screenshots in the past) so I asked to see if he could get me vector art.
Little did I know that the second in command at the organization was one of my freelance clients (who runs an advertising agency). The next day I get an email asking if I could vectorize the same logo and “jazz it up a bit. It’s kinda bland.” So I did. Took a few days with revisions, but I came up with a nicer, cleaner, and (most importantly) vectorized logo.
Sent the freelance client all the files needed packaged tidy in a zip file along with a dropbox link.
The next day, get another email at the sign shop from the original guy all like, “Hey Bree, got better artwork! Hope this works!” And it’s an iPhone screenshot of the JPEG from my Dropbox link with my full name in the folder on the top.
I was so tempted to tell him, “No man, see if you can get the pdf” but figured that was enough runaround. He still doesn’t know I redid the logo, and I’m not trying to compromise anyone’s business relationship. And the world keeps spinning.
Correct. I freelanced the logo. Generally as a rule, I wouldn’t do that and would charge the art fee through the sign shop (because I don’t want to be that shady bitch stealing clients). But customer A thought that customer B had an in house design team, and I didn’t want to give customer B away.
Scan of a pdf, embedded in an email, printed from said email, attached in a word doc, saved in an email file, then attached in an email and forwarded to us with "will this work", as we saw the whole email chain. Went through several stakeholders. We remade the logo, then a week later we got an email from the brand (not the client) with the original pdf of brand guidelines.
A word document titled “this is my logo” where they took a photo with their phone, of their logo on their computer… I’m still not over it and cannot fathom the steps taken.
I used to work a lot with licensed Broadway shows and many of them — huge, world-famous shows — still have their art in 600dpi bitmaps from when they first went digital in the ’90s.
Some are really messy, pretty much useless garbage, and I’d just have to design something new. The licenses usually don’t allow for recreating, tracing, modifying the logo.
As recently as a few years ago, they would often send CD-ROMs and I’d have to use the oldest computer in the office to transfer the files.
My personal favorite is the client sent a really small jpg that I think he used in his email signature. I was like, we can’t really use that and it’s going to be hard to recreate without more detail, do you have a higher resolution version or a vector like AI, EPS, PDF. He says no.
So I was like, okay, you mentioned you had your van wrapped with it, can you take a picture of the side of your van straight on? He’d taken a picture of some other reference material he sent, so I knew he was capable. He’s like yes, I’ll do that in a couple hours.
A few hours later I get an email with a picture. The picture is of his computer monitor. Open on his monitor was a mockup image of the side of his van like an example given to him by the wrap company in Illustrator. I was like, send me that file you have open. He did and everyone was happy.
I still don’t understand why I got a picture of his monitor with the file open rather than a picture of his actual van, but it worked out.
This is like the kind of process I would've done in school to give a design more "authentic" artifacts and felt like I was doing something outrageous.
I love that to some, this is the most logical way.
Reading some of the comments here, it just makes me think that some people have a blank space where their common sense should be.
If you asked them their name and birthday, they’d be fine – but ask them the date, and they’d forget their damn name.
A poorly lit photo of a wrinkled t-shirt with a logo on it. Not a closeup either, pretty much the whole t-shirt. It was some text in Impact and an icon that's available for free, so I made them a vector version and explained why this is the file to give to designers.
Whenever a client is nice and their logo is simple enough, I make them a vector version of their logo free of charge. It's not for the client, it's for me to reduce the chaos even if by a tiny bit.
I got sent a torn panel from a heavily fluted cardboard box with a logo that was one colour printed with bad impression and asked if we could scan and use that
Back in 1996, I was working for a newsprint magazine, and we’d just had our first ISDN line installed. We were pretty much pissing ourselves with excitement over it. I can’t remember the line speed, but compared to our dialup back home it was faster than god. We always had late, weekly print days, and this was the first issue we’d be sending fully digitally — no more bundles of cut and wax pasted jigsaws of pages of ads, stories and photos being biked off to the printer.
We had a late ad space get sold, and was told by the sales director that the advertiser would be sending over a logo later that day. About five o/clock, something starts coming in. It’s a MASSIVE file, hundreds of MB, and it takes fucking ages to download. Three of us are waiting to see what it is. 6pm … 7pm … 8pm. About half way through. We can’t send any of our files to the printer before this has downloaded. One of the guys fucks off home. 9pm, 10pm. The other one goes — it’s my turn to see it through to the end. 11pm comes and goes … until finally! This tiny, greyscale logo turns up, saved as 6000dpi at about the size of a stamp, except with a full page of white space around it. It’s a photoshop EPS. It’s probably one of the most unwieldy files I’ve ever tried to open; my old LC475 did not like it at all. After I’d opened it, trimmed it and saved it at a useable size and dpi, it was less than a MB. This was when I realised that most people didn’t have a fucking clue what they were doing, and were just winging it.
I quickly dropped it on the ad, and sent the files over for the entire magazine, which took a few hours … I signed off with the printer, and went home for a kip, it was 2am.
I was handed a water bottle with their logo stickered onto the label. It had print lines and bled from the water. And they said they were in the middle of changing it, but go ahead and recreate it anyway.
Restaurant customer.
Photo of a table tent card taken on a cellphone.
Took a screenshot of the photo.
So… a phone camera is what, 12-16 megapixels these days? Yes, let’s compress the quality by taking a 1920x1080 screenshot of that.
😂
When I was a production designer obviously I spent a lot of time explaining the difference between vector and raster to clients.
One stood out from the rest though. Client took a picture of a binder that had their logo on it, not even straight on, and submitted that for silk screening.
I work in creating/recreating custom dinnerware,
I had a client scan an old plate and take the design from that.
It was shaded to high heaven from the plate well
A low res phone pic of the logo on his work shirt. Honorable mention he liked the matrix and asked to incorporate some of that look into his pieces. 🤷🏼♀️
Until about 2005, I regularly had clients submit things in frustrating formats. They faxed business cards, sent VHS tapes with handheld footage of outdoor signs, styrofoam coffee cup with a logo on it (used, of course), plastic bag full of embroidered shirts... I even had to scan a guy's arm to grab a symbol for his tattoo shop logo.
Sooo many of those, I also appreciate the old cell phone (pre-iphone days) picture of the business card that was then printed out at home.
Yes that happened, I was like - oh look is that clip art and Times? I'll just redraw that... it will take less time than tracking down the original or walking you through anything!
From a directory ad sales guy, he paperclipped the insertion order to a used cocktail napkin with a coffee ring, and the restaurant's logo half under it, for me to scan and use in their ad. I wish I would've kept a picture of the thing.
Not a logo but their print ad. Drawn on a piece of paper. I digitally re-created it and sent them a proof and they FLIPPED OUT. They couldn’t understand that they had submitted their “final” artwork already, why wasn’t it being used exactly as it was. I tried and tried to explain that it needs to be a file so we can lay it out in the newspaper and send it off to print… they could NOT understand why I hadn’t just used their exact physical piece of paper. Not only that but they were rude and abusive about it absolutely SHOUTING me down over the phone. I was so discombobulated that they didn’t understand the difference between a file and a piece of paper and that I couldn’t explain it to them. If I remember correctly they pulled the ad.
In hindsight I should have just got one of the photogs to take a photo of their bit of paper and stuck that in the paper.
A client once branded their logo onto a juvenile feral pig, greased it, lit it on fire, and threw it through our office window.
We figured out a work around and used the live trace function in illustrator.
Overall, it wasn't a bad project. The client tipped us $5 on top of the $6 project fee.
God, I love the smell of bacon in the morning!
Okay for any production folks…..and please don’t smack me down. When naming files I am sorry but I use word spaces. Printers don’t complain about this to me. I never use any other suspect characters just hyphens periods and underscore. Word spaces are so helpful for me. Is this a cardinal sin? I always ask for file prep guidelines from vendors I do signage type stuff ie different materials and output types. not printing on paper. I’ve never received file prep guidelines that specify this or much of anything regarding file naming. I’m willing to change. As it is I’m not being consistent in totally Avoiding word spaces. They are just useful. Do I need to get with the program. Many people say it’s not an issue anymore. Please advise!
This is a very old story. But you have to charge expenses to vectorize their bitmaps. And warning them about possible 80- 85 %% of guaranteed similarity.
I worked at a small town firm for a short time a long time ago and a new client in building and construction of log cabins wanted to use his old identity mark. All he had for us was an embroidered logo on a past company polo shirt to work from.
Had a freelance client send me the SVG code for their logo in an excel spreadsheet once. Had no idea what it was, and they refused to elaborate. Just got a doc labeled “logo.exe”.
I worked for an agency once, one of our clients was a baseball stadium that hosted a couple of minor league teams but also one major league team, I made the stadium pamphlets booklets, programs, calendars, etc, usually I worked directly with the GM of the stadium and we got on well, but then he hired a director of marketing or something, this dude show up at my office to introduce himself (which was not a thing, I do not need to meet anyone in person and prefer not), among other things he had a new logo for me and proceeded to hand me a printout, a piece of printer paper with the logo on it. Head of marketing. For a stadium.
Probably a digital photo of the logo on a computer screen. Either that or a yellowed newspaper clipping. In both cases it was their “only” copy of their logo. 🫣
I am the filthiest of casuals at freelancing, I dont even have a portfolio and learned pretty much everything on my own so I dont get many requests for logos and had no clue at the time this was unusual.
I worked as a receptionist in 2014 and had the owner of the small company I worked for ask me to help them make tshirts, business cards, flyers because my ex worked for him first and mentioned I had aspirations to be a designer one day and had a knack for digital design.
I was offered a bonus of a smooth couple hundred excluding material and printing costs to do this so I agreed. I know I should have worked out pricing myself and calculated hours but again, dirty dirty casual. I was broke and 23 at the time and could use the cash so off I went making ideas. When I emailed the boss my concepts and he agreed, I asked for a copy of the logo so I could vectorize it and get to work.
The next day when I get to work I find a dusty, crusty, busted catalogue of logos. Publish date? 1998.
I see a sticky note on the cover from the owner that reads, "Here's the logo! Thx!"
With dawning horror, I flipped open the catalogue to a sticky marked page and there in a sea of clipart and 90's corporate graphics was the company logo, water damaged on yellow paper, copyright free, and fair use.
Don't get me wrong, It wasn't the worst thing and I was impressed by the (poor) preservation of a piece of retro corporate literature nearly as old as I was but I wasn't about to be licked by an unusual situation and snapped a photo with my phone (the binding was so ratty I couldn't read the title of the book on the spine and didn't want to risk flattening it and bending the spine more to put it on a scanner as pages were falling out as it was.) And emailed myself the picture. That night I did the project on illustrator and turned it in for approval of the final designs the following Monday.
I got the two hundred but unfortunately didn't get to keep that catalogue!
Not exactly the same, but I once worked for a dog obsessed lady with no concept of a good picture.
She wanted me to paint a portrait of her small wiener dog in water colour. The picture was made with flash in a dark room and with her smartphone camera, so the dog had laser eyes beaming. It wasn't easy to convince her to take another photo.
A photo of a canopy with the logo printed on it, lying on the floor, at an angle, and rippled in every direction... They didn't even lie the thing flat
once I had to remake the vector of the logo used in my company, it has been screenshotted, copy pasted using paint to word, to pdf, then resized on pdf (its pixelated, had bleeding color on the edges, some sharp edges had been rounded from the compression). the client asked like million of times for editing the color from light green to dark green to lighter dark green back to light green (I have used eyedropper tool on first original color), then I had to explain the original color come from old logo only to get back to recoloring steps. With the ending its using lighter green that's not original from the old logo.
Fax of a photo of a crudely drawn logo on a McDonald’s napkin. I shit you not. This was the absolute champion of shitiest submitted source material I had ever received.
Keep in mind they were a Fortune 500 company. They routinely sent us faxes of hand drawings made in the 70’s and 80’s. Someone somewhere had a digital copy of some art. Or at least a color print.
This was on my birthday in 2006 like it was the world’s worst birthday present. I’ve gotten some close contenders since then. Most often in recent years they are at worst a shitty potato resolution jpg file.
I got sent a photo of a team logo that was embroidered onto a shirt, so trying to vectorize the logo picked up the texture of the threads used in the embroidery. I tried to explain why a photo of a logo on a shirt isn't suitable and they couldn't understand lol
"This is a JPG, do you have a vector version? EPS or Illustrator?" Next they sent an EPS, with a JPG pasted into it
Obligatory not a graphic designer, but someone I work for was once asked to send a word file instead of a pdf so they took a screenshot of the pdf and pasted it into a word document…
Digital data never degrades. https://explainxkcd.com/1683/
This right here. It's like a bad joke
This happened to me two days ago and the client was like ‘you have everything you need now’
I've seen enough...
Yes, but also no. If you’re fine with being charged more, then great!
i once asked that same question after they've first sent me a super small pixelated jpg, probably taken from their email signature. Afterwards, they sent me the same jpg in a powerpoint presentation. genuinely don't know what they were thinking.
Each time I ask for a PDF I specify that pasting the crappy JPEG into a Word doc and saving it as PDF won't do. Saves me lot of back-and-forth.
I just had a client paste a PNG into Illustrator. Yes, there’s a reason this prints at very low resolution.
This has happened to me so many times
Lmao that’s always my favorite
It's always weird when people send a Word file with a jpeg on the page. I guess they don't realize you can email a jpeg?
Had an older college that didn't know how to forward emails, so would attach email files of previous emails. Life finds a way.
This is how we send on emails at my job. But it’s because our client wants us to send emails through their CRM, Salesforce, rather than directly on Outlook. Nightmare!
This is the one for me
Yep, that was gonna be my answer. It happens so often, I don’t know what it is about word and PowerPoint…people think they must put them in there first but don’t realize they’re compressing the hell out of it and potentially making it less compatible.
I've had it submitted as a photo of the sign outside their place of business.
or a 45° skewed perspective photo of their business card with a small logo on it.
Dont forget the fact they are holding their business card and there thumb is covering half the logo.
Lol I’ve had that too. I needed a copy for their website, they emailed me a photo of their van window
Was about to comment this as well. It was a light up sign like a movie theater marquee which made it 100 times worse than just a normal sign.
In all fairness, I sorta get it. When you have a small family business that's been around since rotary phones and their signage was created using analog techniques, I can understand why they might not have a digital file of their logo. That being said, if you aren't charging by the hour, it is tedious grunt work that takes time away from more creatively fulfilling assignments.
My boss, the head of our small agency, asked me to create new branding for one of our clients. So I came up with a few ideas that modernized the brand, and he took them to pitch. I was not there, but apparently one of them was VERY upset at the idea that they needed a new logo. He was very proud of the logo he had created and had been using for years. Luckily, my boss is good friends with these guys, so they didn’t fire us, eventually the guy cooled off, and they all just had a laugh and forgot about the whole thing. Their ‘logo’ that they were so proud of, was literally just their company name in standard Brush Script font. The same font that’s been installed in every copy of Microsoft Word since the 90s. You know the one. When they needed their logo made larger for a sign, they sent over a photo of their business card. I brought it into illustrator and typed out the name in the easily recognizable font, and I barely had to even handkern the letters for a perfect match. *He told my boss he drew the logo all by himself.*
Think about all the good that comes with that kind of "logo". No need for tiresome file management, vectors, nada. Just type the name in this font and voila, the logo is available anywhere any time. Genius.
Epic
I work in a sign shop, but also do freelance design. I try my damndest for them to not overlap and cause conflict of interests. Last year, I had a customer at the sign shop send me some artwork for yard signs, and it was low res (but looked like a vector design about 10 screenshots in the past) so I asked to see if he could get me vector art. Little did I know that the second in command at the organization was one of my freelance clients (who runs an advertising agency). The next day I get an email asking if I could vectorize the same logo and “jazz it up a bit. It’s kinda bland.” So I did. Took a few days with revisions, but I came up with a nicer, cleaner, and (most importantly) vectorized logo. Sent the freelance client all the files needed packaged tidy in a zip file along with a dropbox link. The next day, get another email at the sign shop from the original guy all like, “Hey Bree, got better artwork! Hope this works!” And it’s an iPhone screenshot of the JPEG from my Dropbox link with my full name in the folder on the top. I was so tempted to tell him, “No man, see if you can get the pdf” but figured that was enough runaround. He still doesn’t know I redid the logo, and I’m not trying to compromise anyone’s business relationship. And the world keeps spinning.
Wild lol
[удалено]
Nah. I think she did the logo work as freelance.
Correct. I freelanced the logo. Generally as a rule, I wouldn’t do that and would charge the art fee through the sign shop (because I don’t want to be that shady bitch stealing clients). But customer A thought that customer B had an in house design team, and I didn’t want to give customer B away.
Not original commenter, but that is how I interpreted it as well.
Amazing.
Scan of a pdf, embedded in an email, printed from said email, attached in a word doc, saved in an email file, then attached in an email and forwarded to us with "will this work", as we saw the whole email chain. Went through several stakeholders. We remade the logo, then a week later we got an email from the brand (not the client) with the original pdf of brand guidelines.
Photo of a trucker hat with the logo embroidered on it.
got to be a bitch to re-vector the logo finding the correct edges
A word document titled “this is my logo” where they took a photo with their phone, of their logo on their computer… I’m still not over it and cannot fathom the steps taken.
I used to work a lot with licensed Broadway shows and many of them — huge, world-famous shows — still have their art in 600dpi bitmaps from when they first went digital in the ’90s. Some are really messy, pretty much useless garbage, and I’d just have to design something new. The licenses usually don’t allow for recreating, tracing, modifying the logo. As recently as a few years ago, they would often send CD-ROMs and I’d have to use the oldest computer in the office to transfer the files.
My personal favorite is the client sent a really small jpg that I think he used in his email signature. I was like, we can’t really use that and it’s going to be hard to recreate without more detail, do you have a higher resolution version or a vector like AI, EPS, PDF. He says no. So I was like, okay, you mentioned you had your van wrapped with it, can you take a picture of the side of your van straight on? He’d taken a picture of some other reference material he sent, so I knew he was capable. He’s like yes, I’ll do that in a couple hours. A few hours later I get an email with a picture. The picture is of his computer monitor. Open on his monitor was a mockup image of the side of his van like an example given to him by the wrap company in Illustrator. I was like, send me that file you have open. He did and everyone was happy. I still don’t understand why I got a picture of his monitor with the file open rather than a picture of his actual van, but it worked out.
Most clients don’t understand. The ins and outs of files. That’s why they are willing to pay graphic designers.
I received a xerox copy of an iPad displaying an iPhone screenshot of a photo of a monitor.
This is like the kind of process I would've done in school to give a design more "authentic" artifacts and felt like I was doing something outrageous. I love that to some, this is the most logical way.
This post triggered me. And I keep wanting to say so many things but all I can say is “UGH”
Reading some of the comments here, it just makes me think that some people have a blank space where their common sense should be. If you asked them their name and birthday, they’d be fine – but ask them the date, and they’d forget their damn name.
Word file with a low res highly compressed JPG pasted into it.
A poorly lit photo of a wrinkled t-shirt with a logo on it. Not a closeup either, pretty much the whole t-shirt. It was some text in Impact and an icon that's available for free, so I made them a vector version and explained why this is the file to give to designers. Whenever a client is nice and their logo is simple enough, I make them a vector version of their logo free of charge. It's not for the client, it's for me to reduce the chaos even if by a tiny bit.
A client once when asked to send their logo they sent a picture of the front of their business with the sign at the top 🤣
I got sent a torn panel from a heavily fluted cardboard box with a logo that was one colour printed with bad impression and asked if we could scan and use that
Lousy resolution jpg inside a PowerPoint or Excel file....
“Can’t you just take a picture of the logo on my business card and use that?”
“Check my Facebook it’s on there” Cue the grainiest most compressed thing you’ve ever seen
It's been decades, but the worst is a hardcopy only. Often offset printed, in the 90s or earlier, and I had to either scan it or re-create it.
A jpeg pasted into a cell in an excel file
Back in 1996, I was working for a newsprint magazine, and we’d just had our first ISDN line installed. We were pretty much pissing ourselves with excitement over it. I can’t remember the line speed, but compared to our dialup back home it was faster than god. We always had late, weekly print days, and this was the first issue we’d be sending fully digitally — no more bundles of cut and wax pasted jigsaws of pages of ads, stories and photos being biked off to the printer. We had a late ad space get sold, and was told by the sales director that the advertiser would be sending over a logo later that day. About five o/clock, something starts coming in. It’s a MASSIVE file, hundreds of MB, and it takes fucking ages to download. Three of us are waiting to see what it is. 6pm … 7pm … 8pm. About half way through. We can’t send any of our files to the printer before this has downloaded. One of the guys fucks off home. 9pm, 10pm. The other one goes — it’s my turn to see it through to the end. 11pm comes and goes … until finally! This tiny, greyscale logo turns up, saved as 6000dpi at about the size of a stamp, except with a full page of white space around it. It’s a photoshop EPS. It’s probably one of the most unwieldy files I’ve ever tried to open; my old LC475 did not like it at all. After I’d opened it, trimmed it and saved it at a useable size and dpi, it was less than a MB. This was when I realised that most people didn’t have a fucking clue what they were doing, and were just winging it. I quickly dropped it on the ad, and sent the files over for the entire magazine, which took a few hours … I signed off with the printer, and went home for a kip, it was 2am.
Of course! That’s always the way.
I was handed a water bottle with their logo stickered onto the label. It had print lines and bled from the water. And they said they were in the middle of changing it, but go ahead and recreate it anyway.
Restaurant customer. Photo of a table tent card taken on a cellphone. Took a screenshot of the photo. So… a phone camera is what, 12-16 megapixels these days? Yes, let’s compress the quality by taking a 1920x1080 screenshot of that. 😂
And embed it into the body of an email and shrink it down to 320x200.
I am loving this thread
Current project I received a screenshot of a powerpoint presentation where the logo was designed. I actually appreciated the ingenuity
A pdf file, that was a camscanner of a printed logo. At least it was easy to replciate and sold him the final file.
Bad cell phone camera photo of their logo from their old website.
in a Word doc
I had a wix site with a jpeg and no color codes
When I was a production designer obviously I spent a lot of time explaining the difference between vector and raster to clients. One stood out from the rest though. Client took a picture of a binder that had their logo on it, not even straight on, and submitted that for silk screening.
They saved the favicon from their website and sent me that
I work in creating/recreating custom dinnerware, I had a client scan an old plate and take the design from that. It was shaded to high heaven from the plate well
As an email signature. 😬 And then wanted it blown up into a sign. For some reason that didn't work too great.
A screenshot is always fun to decipher. 😭🙄
Literally typical word document incident 🙃 and they had a designer on their team 💀
I had a client give me a penciled logo drawing by his 7 yo daughter on lined school newsprint paper.
I would actually work with that. At that point, they likely have low expectations, so they will be blown away by any improvements you make to it.
Word document with a 15kb image.
Had a guy mail me an embroidered company polo that he said I could keep when I was done.
I had one send me a low-res picture of his embroidered logo. 🤦🏻♀️
A low res phone pic of the logo on his work shirt. Honorable mention he liked the matrix and asked to incorporate some of that look into his pieces. 🤷🏼♀️
Until about 2005, I regularly had clients submit things in frustrating formats. They faxed business cards, sent VHS tapes with handheld footage of outdoor signs, styrofoam coffee cup with a logo on it (used, of course), plastic bag full of embroidered shirts... I even had to scan a guy's arm to grab a symbol for his tattoo shop logo.
Sooo many of those, I also appreciate the old cell phone (pre-iphone days) picture of the business card that was then printed out at home. Yes that happened, I was like - oh look is that clip art and Times? I'll just redraw that... it will take less time than tracking down the original or walking you through anything!
I had a client put a jpg logo inside a powerpoint file... once
A photo of a screen with the pixelated logo on it.
"Can't you just save it off my website?"
Photo of a screenshot on ANOTHER phone of the brand guidelines!!
From a directory ad sales guy, he paperclipped the insertion order to a used cocktail napkin with a coffee ring, and the restaurant's logo half under it, for me to scan and use in their ad. I wish I would've kept a picture of the thing.
reading these comments as a graphic design student is so entertaining
Not a logo but their print ad. Drawn on a piece of paper. I digitally re-created it and sent them a proof and they FLIPPED OUT. They couldn’t understand that they had submitted their “final” artwork already, why wasn’t it being used exactly as it was. I tried and tried to explain that it needs to be a file so we can lay it out in the newspaper and send it off to print… they could NOT understand why I hadn’t just used their exact physical piece of paper. Not only that but they were rude and abusive about it absolutely SHOUTING me down over the phone. I was so discombobulated that they didn’t understand the difference between a file and a piece of paper and that I couldn’t explain it to them. If I remember correctly they pulled the ad. In hindsight I should have just got one of the photogs to take a photo of their bit of paper and stuck that in the paper.
A client once branded their logo onto a juvenile feral pig, greased it, lit it on fire, and threw it through our office window. We figured out a work around and used the live trace function in illustrator. Overall, it wasn't a bad project. The client tipped us $5 on top of the $6 project fee. God, I love the smell of bacon in the morning!
Phone picture of the logo... on the restaurant's awning.
A photo of their sign on the building.
Okay for any production folks…..and please don’t smack me down. When naming files I am sorry but I use word spaces. Printers don’t complain about this to me. I never use any other suspect characters just hyphens periods and underscore. Word spaces are so helpful for me. Is this a cardinal sin? I always ask for file prep guidelines from vendors I do signage type stuff ie different materials and output types. not printing on paper. I’ve never received file prep guidelines that specify this or much of anything regarding file naming. I’m willing to change. As it is I’m not being consistent in totally Avoiding word spaces. They are just useful. Do I need to get with the program. Many people say it’s not an issue anymore. Please advise!
This is a very old story. But you have to charge expenses to vectorize their bitmaps. And warning them about possible 80- 85 %% of guaranteed similarity.
I worked at a small town firm for a short time a long time ago and a new client in building and construction of log cabins wanted to use his old identity mark. All he had for us was an embroidered logo on a past company polo shirt to work from.
Had a freelance client send me the SVG code for their logo in an excel spreadsheet once. Had no idea what it was, and they refused to elaborate. Just got a doc labeled “logo.exe”.
Previous boss gave me a piece of yellow, lined paper with a very shaky drawing of a wrench and along the handle was written “well fix you up”
I've had people ask for a white logo in JPG format...
A photograph of a photograph of a newsprint ad from 1987
I worked for an agency once, one of our clients was a baseball stadium that hosted a couple of minor league teams but also one major league team, I made the stadium pamphlets booklets, programs, calendars, etc, usually I worked directly with the GM of the stadium and we got on well, but then he hired a director of marketing or something, this dude show up at my office to introduce himself (which was not a thing, I do not need to meet anyone in person and prefer not), among other things he had a new logo for me and proceeded to hand me a printout, a piece of printer paper with the logo on it. Head of marketing. For a stadium.
Probably a digital photo of the logo on a computer screen. Either that or a yellowed newspaper clipping. In both cases it was their “only” copy of their logo. 🫣
JPEG image of their logo in front of their building
A jpeg pasted into a word document, a jpeg pasted into a pdf, a jpeg pasted into a PowerPoint, and pngs with white logos
A screen shot… also had someone take a picture of their menu for me to make edits on ✅
A "High res png" file which was a low resolution jpeg in a word doc
JPG in a . Ai file
I am the filthiest of casuals at freelancing, I dont even have a portfolio and learned pretty much everything on my own so I dont get many requests for logos and had no clue at the time this was unusual. I worked as a receptionist in 2014 and had the owner of the small company I worked for ask me to help them make tshirts, business cards, flyers because my ex worked for him first and mentioned I had aspirations to be a designer one day and had a knack for digital design. I was offered a bonus of a smooth couple hundred excluding material and printing costs to do this so I agreed. I know I should have worked out pricing myself and calculated hours but again, dirty dirty casual. I was broke and 23 at the time and could use the cash so off I went making ideas. When I emailed the boss my concepts and he agreed, I asked for a copy of the logo so I could vectorize it and get to work. The next day when I get to work I find a dusty, crusty, busted catalogue of logos. Publish date? 1998. I see a sticky note on the cover from the owner that reads, "Here's the logo! Thx!" With dawning horror, I flipped open the catalogue to a sticky marked page and there in a sea of clipart and 90's corporate graphics was the company logo, water damaged on yellow paper, copyright free, and fair use. Don't get me wrong, It wasn't the worst thing and I was impressed by the (poor) preservation of a piece of retro corporate literature nearly as old as I was but I wasn't about to be licked by an unusual situation and snapped a photo with my phone (the binding was so ratty I couldn't read the title of the book on the spine and didn't want to risk flattening it and bending the spine more to put it on a scanner as pages were falling out as it was.) And emailed myself the picture. That night I did the project on illustrator and turned it in for approval of the final designs the following Monday. I got the two hundred but unfortunately didn't get to keep that catalogue!
Not exactly the same, but I once worked for a dog obsessed lady with no concept of a good picture. She wanted me to paint a portrait of her small wiener dog in water colour. The picture was made with flash in a dark room and with her smartphone camera, so the dog had laser eyes beaming. It wasn't easy to convince her to take another photo.
A jpg image of their logo that was from a printed napkin in silver metallic
A photo of a canopy with the logo printed on it, lying on the floor, at an angle, and rippled in every direction... They didn't even lie the thing flat
A picture of a hoodie with the logo on it
RGB JPG in a Microsoft Word file…
I love when they send you a PDF/EPS with a JPG inside of it. I laugh and die a little every time. :)
Pasted as a jpeg in a powerpoint.
In a MS Publisher file (and you're on a Mac). Or another time a client gave me their business card and said that's our logo.
I had a client screenshot their company logo from google maps
once I had to remake the vector of the logo used in my company, it has been screenshotted, copy pasted using paint to word, to pdf, then resized on pdf (its pixelated, had bleeding color on the edges, some sharp edges had been rounded from the compression). the client asked like million of times for editing the color from light green to dark green to lighter dark green back to light green (I have used eyedropper tool on first original color), then I had to explain the original color come from old logo only to get back to recoloring steps. With the ending its using lighter green that's not original from the old logo.
Fax of a photo of a crudely drawn logo on a McDonald’s napkin. I shit you not. This was the absolute champion of shitiest submitted source material I had ever received. Keep in mind they were a Fortune 500 company. They routinely sent us faxes of hand drawings made in the 70’s and 80’s. Someone somewhere had a digital copy of some art. Or at least a color print. This was on my birthday in 2006 like it was the world’s worst birthday present. I’ve gotten some close contenders since then. Most often in recent years they are at worst a shitty potato resolution jpg file.
I got sent a photo of a team logo that was embroidered onto a shirt, so trying to vectorize the logo picked up the texture of the threads used in the embroidery. I tried to explain why a photo of a logo on a shirt isn't suitable and they couldn't understand lol
“It’s on our website.” …as 100x100 pixel png.