Don't you wish you had more competitors like this?

2006-06-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

Can we talk about two things that are greatly overlooked when dealing with the public:
-Prepress
-Proofreading
-Final Proof

The following is the story of the failure of an advertising company on every level to do their job. Skip to the section in bold to get the full gist of the story.

Jeff and Carolyn McDonald are not so sure of that. They own Twin Oaks Golf Club, a nine-hole golf course a few miles south of Greenville.

They bought the place in January, and the same month, signed a contract with Focus One Advertising Service Inc. to provide scorecards for the golf course. There would be no charge to Twin Oaks. Focus One would make its money by selling ads on the cards. It was a two-year deal, and Focus One would provide 20,000 scorecards each year.

"It sounded like a great deal," said Jeff. "I had thought we'd have to buy the scorecard ourselves." He said he figured the costs would be about $1,800.

There is nothing complicated about a golf scorecard. You start with a thick piece of paper about 12 inches by 4 inches. Fold it so you have four pages. Put a photo or a design of some sort on the front page. On the inside pages, you list the holes, the yardage and the par for each hole and you leave a box under this information in which the golfer can record his score.

Because people generally play 18 holes, the scorecard for Twin Oaks lists its nine holes twice.

The scorecards from Focus One arrived in mid-April. There were problems. The cover of the scorecards featured a photo of the course in which the grass was more red than green. But the big problem had to do with the par numbers. The second hole is a par 4. It was correctly listed on the first inside page, but was then listed as a par 3 on the second page. The third hole was correctly listed as a par 5 on the first inside page, but was listed as a par 4 on the second page. There were two other holes also listed incorrectly on the second page.

Artist's Rendition

I don't know anything about the company involved, primarily because they HAVE NO WEB PRESENCE AT ALL but there seems to be several things that are obvious:

-The person laying the scorecard out thinks "prepress" only happens at the dry cleaners. It's rather shocking that the picture wasn't descibed as "all boxy and fuzzy" as well. Maybe while the designer was flailing around in the dark while designing the scorecard, he/she accidentally set the DPI to 300 for the document.

-The advertising company couldn't be bothered to not only assemble the proper materials and give them to their designer but also to not even send out a proof to the golf course owners.

I see several problems arising for the advertising company, which has gone forward in not reprinting the cards and is instead strongarming the golf course into using them.

1. With incorrect information and piss-poor color correction, the cards don't adequately reflect the professional nature of the golf course. By nature, golf courses are the playgrounds of business execs and owners. Giving your customers piss-poor cards is NOT the way to impress them no matter what the excuse is.

2. Being an advertising company that strong-arms the gathering place for corporate/business decision makers after the failure of your graphic design department is ridiculously bad business. Word-of-mouth usually takes awhile to get to the heads of companies, this just jumped to the head of the line without making an appointment with the secretary pool.

3. They sold advertising space on cards that even if they are used does not reflect well on the advertisers.

What are the possible excuses here? Printing companies mess up and customers are ridiculous people who seem to think that the printing process is the equivalent of hitting the "print" button on a Heidelberg after changing the toner cartridge.

-the printing company could have gotten the colors wrong or the ad company could have used a service that allowed express delivery at the expense of a proof.

-the customer was an idiot. We've all been there and maybe the customer gave them a Publisher Document that can only be opened on the shores of Tripoli at the wreckage of the Pirate King of North Africa's ship "The Happy Caliph". But this is the reason why customers are given nicely-worded proofs to sign off on before they go to print.

In the end, the ad company had a better lawyer than they did layout artist. Every day of my life, I pray to a God I am not sure exists to bring more companies like this into the design field.

Full article:
Golf cards were subpar, yet legal letter scares owners (pops)

Dancing girls

2006-05-30T03:20:00.000-07:00

An anonymous contributor writes:

So I got an email from a client today. The guy is a grade-A bell-end. Keeps changing his mind on what he wants and for some reason we let him. It's kinda our fault because we never tied him in to a firm return brief.

But we have made a great website for him, despite his efforts to crap it up with an overabundance of Flash and colours. He's currently overseas so we had to send him a version of the site by email.

His critical review? "I thought it was going to be more 'dancing girls'. Are we going to flash it up a bit?"

No. No we're not. What we're going to do is meet with you and sack you. We wish you were our competition's client, and tomorrow you will be.

My cousin has photoshop, totally and he could do it for, like $200

2006-05-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

he's a college kid, but I want to use you so I need you to give me a deal.

My Cousin Has Photoshop

Don't you wish you had more competitors like this?

Dancing girls

My cousin has photoshop, totally and he could do it for, like $200