Years and years ago when I was young, incredibly stupid, and eager for work, I received an e-mail from someone who had a “possible design job” for me. He was a photographer who was interested in having a web site, an online gallery that would showcase his work.

As I had at the time never been paid to do web design before, it sounded like a great opportunity for me. Numerous e-mails ensued. Mine asked a lot of questions about what he had in mind for the design, whether he already had a domain name and a web host, how many of his photos he wanted to display, and how much money he planned on spending. His e-mails, on the other hand, answered a lot of questions, none of them mine and none of them relevant to the business at hand, and asked an entirely new set of questions based on the questions I had asked him. I of course answered them, probably a whole lot more comprehensively than I needed to, but my answers only engendered yet more questions from him, as well as a lot of irrelevant bits of information and small talk.

It should have been obvious to me that this would not go well, but as I mentioned above, I was incredibly stupid. I continued in this manner until the e-mails became long-distance phone calls, and the long-distance phone calls became an agreed-upon meeting halfway between our locations. Every e-mail and phone call was long and pointless, with hardly any information I could actually use to design a web site, so I haven’t the faintest idea why I thought a face-to-face meeting would be such a great idea. I guess I figured I’d have an easier time keeping him to the subject at hand, but I figured wrong.

The drive was long, as much or more than my daily commute at the time, which was 75 miles each way. The meeting was at a mall on a weekend, so there was hardly any parking, which meant the walk from the car to the meeting spot was long, too.

I brought my notebook, a checklist, a meeting agenda, and high hopes that all the time spent would be worth it. He, on the other hand, brought his silent wife and a lot of one-sided and meaningless conversation. Every now and then I’d steer the conversation back with a pointed question, but to no avail. I even tried asking his wife the questions, hoping she’d take over and give me the answers I needed, also to no avail.

I began to realize the man was probably just lonely and wanted to talk, but he was so damn talkative that no one actually spent any time in conversation with him, least of all his own wife. Perhaps he had gotten so desperate for someone to listen to him that he finally resorted to querying freelance designers about “possible design jobs” just so he could have someone to lead on with the carrot of commission money.

H.E. had tried to warn me at the start of all this, and it was only at the end of that horrible lunch meeting—after time, gas money, and long-distance minutes had been spent—that I finally heard.

I got up, said I wasn’t the designer for him, and wished him all the best, and from that day on, if a potential client queried me and didn’t have all the information I needed to do the job, I tried not to spend more time on it than I could afford to, and I can’t afford much.

Please be kind to your graphic designer. Do not assume they have all the time in the world to do nothing else but your project. Give them all the information they need to do the job, technical specifications, scope, art direction, preferences, and whatever else that is pertinent. Then pay them well. It takes time to read the e-mails, time to answer questions, time to ask questions about any missing information, and time to do the actual work.

If you don’t do that, there are others who will, and graphic designers would rather work with those people first over you. They are the surer thing.

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