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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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When Good Design Falls Into The Wrong Hands

Let me tell you a lit­tle story. It’s about a client who decided to end a project early, before all the work was com­pleted, so they could take con­trol of the fin­ished prod­uct. All work was paid for, as-per the con­tract, so no com­plaints, right?

Wrong.

Almost four months after hand­ing over the project files to their IT depart­ment, along with clear instruc­tions (not that many were needed, since the lay­out and markup were fairly straight­for­ward, as was the CSS), we receive an email let­ting us know the site was finally live. “Ter­rific!” we thought, “Now we can link to it and show off some more recent work!” Then we clicked the link.

Hor­ror. Dis­be­lief. Shock. Page after page, bastardized–results Dr. Franken­stein would be proud of. A mon­stros­ity wrought not on the oper­at­ing table, but within Adobe GoLive, and at the hands of what can only be assumed is a mad­man (or even worse: an entire team of madmen).

Gaze in hor­ri­fied won­der at the acces­si­bil­ity state­ment, ren­dered false by the man­gling of markup and nav­i­ga­tion. Stare with mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion at the once text-based nav­i­ga­tion now ren­dered as images. Run cry­ing from the room when you see the body text, once styled and pure, now stark naked and barren.

Is this a work of fic­tion? Sadly, no: you can view the ghastly real­ity right here.

“But wait!” you scream! “What did the orig­i­nal, unfin­ished site look like before it was ren­dered help­less by these mon­sters?” Well chil­dren, I’ll show you…just peek behind this vel­vet curtain…

As we grieve for our loss, it would make us feel bet­ter if some­one, any­one would share with us their sto­ries of sim­i­lar atroc­i­ties and client-committed crimes against design, so we might find some comfort.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

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33 comments on “When Good Design Falls Into The Wrong Hands”

  1. Posted by Ryan Parman on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    Well, my expe­ri­ence wasn’t THAT bad, but I was still pretty miffed. I cre­ated the front page design from a Pho­to­shop image that was given to me to work with.

    I made sure that every­thing was good, clean, valid code, and I kept a num­ber of good acces­si­bil­ity issues in mind when I did the design.

    I also wrote up a few notes so that when they went to mod­ify the site, they could main­tain the look and feel. Piece of cake.

    The first thing that hap­pened was that they opened it up in Dreamweaver. They obvi­ously know noth­ing of CSS, or aes­thet­ics. Their header images are far too large, and although they didn’t anni­hi­late my markup, they did stu­pid anti-accessibility things unnecessarily.

    The URL in ques­tion is http://www.wti-ep.com

    My story is not nearly as bad as yours (not even remotely), but I was still pretty irritated.

  2. Posted by Lea on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    The funny thing is the rollover for His­tory has a mis­take in it, too. The changes make absolutely no sense to me. What a waste of a pre­vi­ously good web­site. For­tu­nately, I have not a hor­ror story like that yet… I grieve for you.

  3. Posted by Jeremy Keith on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    I can empathise 100% with you on this one. This has hap­pened to me on quite a few occasions.

    What’s not quite as soul-destroying, but quite annoy­ing in its own way, is when sites are changed only slightly but those slight changes undo all the striv­ing for val­i­da­tion that went into the orig­i­nal design.

    This site no longer val­i­dates. Every one of the val­i­da­tion issues is caused by the client mak­ing changes whilst ignor­ing the style guide I provided.

    Ah well, what can you do?

    Long live the inde­pen­dent web: as long as we have pet projects and per­sonal sites that we can use as port­fo­lio pieces, we’ll never have to rely com­pletely on past work main­tain­ing its integrity.

  4. Posted by Paul G on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    You have to love how the acces­si­bil­ity page invites you to val­i­date the page’s XHTML, but:

    1 — The link is broken.

    2 — When you man­u­ally val­i­date the page, it iden­ti­fies itself as HTML 4.01 Tran­si­tional, not XHTML

    3 — There are 44 val­i­da­tion errors, most of which involve the use of a non-existant <spacer> tag or non-existant attrib­utes like “gridx”

    Sheez, between using four times as much HTML con­vert­ing the site to a table lay­out and con­vert­ing all of the pre­vi­ously text-based nav­i­ga­tion into images, They prob­a­bly increased their band­width by an order of magnitude.

  5. Posted by Keith on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    This hap­pens to me on almost every project. I try not to worry about it, but to be hon­est it’s made my port­fo­lio rather light.

    The worst is about a year ago when I worked on a project with a rather new Web designer (who was related to the project owner — avoid this sit­u­a­tion at all costs), straight out of school. I tried to build the site in as forward-thinking, stan­dard, usable way as pos­si­ble, all the while try­ing to edu­cate this per­son to the real­i­ties of real world Web design.

    Every sin­gle thing I did was changed for the worse. I still got paid, but I felt guilty tak­ing their money. Then when I sent an email explain­ing what was wrong, why, and how to fix it, I got told by some­one with about 6 months expe­ri­ence and a design degree (it’s shock­ing what they teach these kids), that I didn’t know what I was talk­ing about.

    Yeah, users just LOVE it when you auto­mat­i­cally resize their win­dows to fit your 300 pixel wide layout.…etc.

  6. Posted by Stinn on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    That’s hor­ri­ble. The dif­fer­ence in the sites is night and day. This has never hap­pened to me, at least not to that extent. I feel for you, at least you have a copy of it if you want it in your portfolio.

  7. Posted by Dan Bowling on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    Ok, so on post 3 there… I don’t get why a web design firm would out con­tract their own web­site… makes no sense to me.

  8. Posted by Paul G on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    Oh, and by way of empa­thy, my day job con­sists of main­tain­ing a site that is so far removed from any resem­b­lence to web stan­dards that attempt­ing to use them gen­er­ally breaks the site in hor­ri­ble, unspeak­able ways. Each and every page of this site (which I will refrain from link­ing or nam­ing, as I would like to keep my job :) weighs in at over 700k of text alone. With­out count­ing images.

    I am often asked to make things “big­ger” or “bright red” or “blink­ing”, which to my ears sounds more like “Is there any way we can make this more obnox­ious and user-hostile?”

    Whee.

  9. Posted by Matt Burris on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    What a night­mare that must be, and a shame. Some­how I don’t think that was an “IT depart­ment” you handed the project over to. I haven’t had this kind of expe­ri­ence (and I hope I never do), but I’ve had clients put their foot down and insist on cer­tain things I dis­agree strongly with, and couldn’t change their minds. In any case, what the com­pany did was just hurt their online busi­ness in many ways.

  10. Posted by Trisignia on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    That’s awfully unfor­tu­nate. It looks like they set about to undo all of the the sub­tly beau­ti­ful touches that make the page great—the bor­ders, font-colors, side­bar, etc. (Well, as great as a page fea­tur­ing alli­ga­tor wrestling can be.)

    My con­do­lences.

  11. Posted by andrew on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    I have to agree that the best part about the changes is not what was changed but what wasn’t changed. The ‘acces­si­bil­ity’, ‘xhtml’, & ‘css’ val­i­da­tion links kill me. That’s pure brilliance.

    I would agree — there seems to be no shared logic in the changes, other than they had no one at hand with any CSS skills what­so­ever. They freaked out after tak­ing it into their hands and ulti­mately rebuilt the whole thing in only way they knew how. It prob­a­bly was rebuilt by the owner’s nephew.

    Bril­liant.

  12. Posted by rseal on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    Andrew, I tought it had been rebuilt by the alli­ga­tor on front page, and the other guy was yelling at the gator “line-height, what?”.

    Clients think they know what they’re doing and they never stop sur­pris­ing me with theyr smart moves. Ever spent 2 months try­ing to con­vince a client that you have the right tech for the job they need and months later you pass by theyr web­site and you see a shinny M$ Front­Page (line28 rulez) pearl?

    I know what you guys go through. Ah well. Let’s move on. It’s their loss.

  13. Posted by Ste Grainer on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    Wow, they even man­aged to make the top image look less appeal­ing — what did they do, open it in some image edit­ing pro­gram and save it as a lower-quality jpeg?! At least they took out the “Valid XHTML and CSS” state­ment. That’s just plain ter­ri­ble — sorry to see an oth­er­wise great site go through that sort of bastardization. :(

  14. Posted by Marko on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    I’ll just say: what an ugly white stripe under the footer! It seems to me their con­tent man­ager was hit­ting PrtScrn just a little-bit too much!

  15. Posted by Lee on Friday, February 20th, 2004.

    They also broke the sticky nav but­tons (every page is the home page!) and the “scroll to nav” link. For a real hoot check the source code on the con­tact page. There’s a javascript error from where they removed the check­form script. After fill­ing out the form you would get bounced to your e-mail app since the action is ‘mailto:’ I’m sure their poten­tial cus­tomers will be impressed.

  16. Posted by g.i.a. on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    I could be wrong, but I think they mis­spelled their own tribe’s name in the fifth para­graph. Some­how “Mic­cus­kee” fry bread doesn’t seem right. Regard­less, hold­ing an alligator’s mouth open with your chin while stand­ing directly in the path of an air­boat does seem thrilling.

  17. Posted by Steven on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    I can’t believe the dif­fer­ence; atleast your designs worked the same in IE; what they have done just seems pointless..

    It seems even more so when you com­pare the con­tact page(s) in IE; you really have to ques­tion what’s going on at the IT depart­ment Miccosukee.com

    –peace

  18. Posted by Adam on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    Oh man, can I relate. Back a year or so ago when I could still stom­ach free­lanc­ing I was work­ing on a redesign of a local, holis­tic magazine’s web site. The lady was nice most of the time, but she was also extremely dif­fi­cult and kept going back and forth on what she wanted.

    So, any­way, this was as far as I got with a design (wanted 100% height and width so there is one table) before she sent me her own mockup (!) and wanted me to just use it and get rid of all the work I had pre­vi­ously done. So, I politely gave her the fin­ger, but still got paid. This is what remains. It makes me more happy than sad to see the butt-ugly design she ended up with, but it always sucks when you put in the work only to get shot down by those who “know what they want”. Oh well, that’s why I no longer free­lance — good riddance!

  19. Posted by Jim on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    That’s insane. The changes they made to the mark-up and dis­play make no sense at all. Why bother pay­ing an out­side pro­fes­sional to do a qual­ity job then allow your in-house mon­keys to crap all over it?

    It’s very frus­trat­ing when site owner’s don’t want to accept that a designer prob­a­bly knows best when it comes to design. It’s not like we tell them how to run their busi­ness. Why can’t we all stick to what we actu­ally know?

    I’ve had some pretty biz­zare requests from clients. It’s a con­tin­u­ous strug­gle to get even the most basic con­cepts of access­abil­ity and web stan­dards across to those who have no real knowl­edge of the inter­net and how it works.

    Per­haps you should sub­mit this fouled-up design to http://webpagesthatsuck.com/ — then send the com­pany an e-mail politely noti­fy­ing them of their ‘accolade’ :)

    Jim.

  20. Posted by Steve on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    Even the orig­i­nal mini 5x5 back­ground pat­tern has suf­fered a bloated change for the worse. I shake my head and turn my back to the com­puter screen.

  21. Posted by Hadley on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    My (not so) secret shame is http://anchar.co.nz. At the time I really really really needed the money, so when my client said it’s too bor­ing, make it more excit­ing, I said “sure!”, and pro­vided a rov­ing cheese slicer that fol­lowed the mouse (IE only), and pro­vided some beau­ti­ful back­grounds that I knew she’d love. (I do how­ever claim absolutely NO respon­si­bil­ity for the logo, I would strongly sug­gest that you NEVER EVER use the font Ransom)

  22. Posted by justin goodlett on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    I can def­i­nitely relate as this has hap­pened to myself on two projects. In short, I was developing/designing a web­site using clean markup which val­i­dated. Use of imagery was kept to a min­i­mal. I handed the project over and shortly after noticed that every bit of nav­i­ga­tion was ren­dered as images and the use of css for lay­out was nev­er­more. The ENTIRE site was marked up using tables. I was dis­traught, just like your­self. I wanted to use the two projects as a port­fo­lio piece. What a pity…

  23. Posted by vlad on Saturday, February 21st, 2004.

    i feel your pain. a sim­i­lar thing once hap­pened to me once when i redesigned a site for a local school. some may say that they don’t care since they did their job and got paid, but to see one’s work man­gled in such a man­ner is under­stand­ably disheartening.

  24. Posted by David House on Sunday, February 22nd, 2004.

    The Anti-Christ is out there.

  25. Posted by Pix on Sunday, February 22nd, 2004.

    The same thing hap­pened to me when design­ing a local site for an inter­na­tional envi­ron­men­tal organ­i­sa­tion. They made us believe they had some­one with the knowl­edge to update the site, but they didn’t. After we fin­ished the job, the site was man­gled beyond recog­ni­tion and then redesigned using front­page. A true work of horror.

    How do other design­ers deal with this? Do they use a local copy for their port­fo­lio? Do they explain what hap­pened? Most start­ing design­ers can’t afford to omit a major project form their portfolio.

  26. Posted by Jethro on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

    I’m actu­ally work­ing under some of those same con­di­tions as we speak. My com­pany was com­mis­sioned to design a site and build tem­plates for a com­pany that would take those tem­plates and fit their con­tent to it. After sub­mit­ting my first round con­cepts, they decided that they would feel more com­fort­able with hand­ing over my con­cepts to their inter­nal art depart­ment instead of ask­ing me to make changes or do some­thing dif­fer­ent. I know what you’re think­ing, “he just gave crappy con­cepts.” Well sorry no. They worked just fine.

    What I got in return from the PRINT ONLY inter­nal art depart­ment was straight out of the early 90s. My well styled header with beau­ti­ful pho­tog­ra­phy was replaced with some badly ren­dered “swirl” vec­tor art, my tab but­tons that they had requested were replaced by EXACT copies of apple.com’s tabs and even ren­dered so small that you could never see them on a nor­mal screen and the doc­u­ment was of course 200 dpi. AND they had already got­ten it approved by man­age­ment (SOMEHOW) over my orig­i­nals. (Remem­ber this is still using my basic con­cept layout)

    When we got it back, we basi­cally said sorry but we can’t use this, and offered an alter­na­tive con­cept to which they said, “We’re not going to present this because we already have the other one approved.” So now instead of fir­ing the client like we should have I am forced to imple­ment this hor­rid design. I wish it was live so I could show it, but alas it is not yet fin­ished. I won’t even get into how badly they have already bas­tardized my tem­plates and CSS.

  27. Posted by Tony on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

    The sad part is, they wouldn’t have had to make ANY changes to the con­tent. If they wanted a larger font in black instead of a lighter shade, one change to the style sheet would have “fixed” the whole site…less than appeal­ing design accom­plished eas­ily while still main­tain­ing valid and acces­si­ble code. I can’t even imag­ine how many hours they put in “con­vert­ing” the site to use tables, lit­tered with font tags, rollover images, etc. Sim­ply amazing.

    Oh, and Adam (com­ment 18), that’s funny. For only $250 bucks they’ll even design a site for you! (I guess they’re now web designers?)

    Sigh.

  28. Posted by spyder on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

    heh, that sucks.

    what is also dis­turb­ing is that the jpeg com­pres­sion they used made the images look hor­ri­ble, check “Scroll to Menu” .

    good that we have per­sonal pages i guess :)

  29. Posted by Dan Bowlign on Monday, February 23rd, 2004.

    Well, when I read the post and com­ments, I was think­ing to myself… “Thank God that hasn’t hap­pened to me” But wait, it just did.

    I spent count­less hours and the small­est web design fee I have ever worked for work­ing on a project. Now, every few days since it shipped, I have got­ten a lit­tle email back telling me to tweak it in some way. First it was sim­ple, add a lit­tle somthing here, take this out. But now, they want me to take off a part of the header, and turn it into a gigan­tic back­ground immage. She wants me to take a Monet art peice, and have it (very dark­ened mind you) the back­ground of the white text. I kept telling her that you can’t read text, and that the way I had it before gave bal­ance to the page.

    Where does one draw the line for how much they mod­ify their work?

  30. Posted by Ken on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004.

    This hap­pened to me once and when I saw what they did to my site I almost cried.

    Part of it is the fact that your client usu­ally doesn’t know any bet­ter. They pay you X amount of dol­lars to develop a site and then some­one says “hey, you paid that guy that much money for this site, well my kid knows a lit­tle HTML from a class he took at the YMCA why don’t you let him do it for you cheaper”. Par­tic­u­larly right now with every­one cut­ting back, most peo­ple don’t know good design from bad design, or the under­ly­ing com­plex­ity of devel­op­ing a web site, con­cepts like usabil­ity, HCI, CSS, web stan­dards, don’t mean any­thing to them.

  31. Posted by Alanna on Wednesday, February 25th, 2004.

    Web­graph is no longer cred­ited on the Cred­its page, too. Does that break the con­tract, since they are now pil­fer­ing your design work?

    And why did they feel the need to touch the site if the con­tent is man­aged by Mov­able­Type? They wouldn’t need to touch the code at all to make changes.

  32. Posted by brew on Thursday, February 26th, 2004.

    Although the changes are clearly butch­ery, I think they made them so the site would fully ren­der in legacy browsers (check it in NS4.x).

    I can only assume you edu­cated the client as to the stan­dards you were going to use and the sub­se­quent impact on sub-standards browsers. They under­stood and agreed to that. Then they changed their mind and decided that they needed a hybrid design that would ren­der fully in older browsers. Lack­ing the bud­get to ask you make the nec­es­sary changes, they took it upon them­selves (or their 13 year old nephew) to make the changes. The nephew couldn’t find the lay­out images that were writ­ten as CSS back­ground images, so he took a screen shot and com­pressed it — hence the ter­ri­ble arti­fact­ing on the main page image. He couldn’t make head nor tail of the CSS styled list nav­i­ga­tion as that wasn’t in his “HTML in 24 Hours” book — so he went with images.

    All of these atroc­i­ties com­mited because the MD still uses Netscape 4.7.

    Clients are stu­pid, it’s our job to help them with that, but it’s not always possible.

  33. Posted by Simon on Thursday, February 26th, 2004.

    I have been think­ing about how we can turn this round. Maybe the answer lies in our terms & con­di­tions or con­tracts. I think main­tain­ing your port­fo­lio by links has had it. We need to go screen shots and add *con­cepts* to our own sites. This has been a really inter­est­ing thread. Thanks. Keep on hacking.