There’s a particular kind of professional frustration that no design school prepares you for. It doesn’t come from tight deadlines, impossible budgets, or even Comic Sans — though Comic Sans deserves its own grief counseling session. It comes from something far more insidious: the client who already knows exactly what they want. And what they want is wrong.
Not slightly off. Not almost there. Wrong in a way that is confident, enthusiastic, and completely immune to reason.
You know the type. They arrive armed with a Pinterest board from 2014, a cousin’s opinion, and an unshakeable conviction forged not in experience, but in a weekend entrepreneurship bootcamp or a YouTube coach with a ring light, a Lamborghini they rented for a thumbnail, and a lot — a lot — of energy. They don’t want a creative partner. They want a pair of hands that executes their vision without asking too many uncomfortable questions — like “are you sure about that font?” or “what exactly is this button supposed to do?” or, God forbid, “have you validated this business model?”
Chapter One: The Slogan That Shall Not Be Touched
Let’s start with a real one. A client — lovely person, truly — had a brand slogan. It was called “Y.B. last”. As in: Why be last? Punchy, right? Motivational. The kind of thing that looks clean on a mug or a hoodie if you handle it with care.
The brief was clear: set the slogan, style it properly, make it sing.
So naturally, I removed the unnecessary quotation marks wrapping the whole thing — because nothing kills the energy of a slogan faster than looking like someone is allegedly saying it — and I added a question mark, because Y.B. last is, grammatically and rhetorically, a question. That’s the whole point. That’s the punch.
The client’s response was immediate and firm: put the quotes back. Keep it exactly as written. No question mark.
I explained. I showed references. I made the case with the patience of a kindergarten teacher introducing the concept of punctuation for the first time. It didn’t matter. The quotes stayed. The question mark never came. Somewhere out there, a slogan is sitting in quotation marks for no reason, looking like a phrase someone’s not entirely sure actually happened.
“Y.B. last” — according to no one in particular, apparently.
Chapter Two: The Native Speaker Who Will Teach You English
Here is something they don’t warn you about in any freelance forum, any LinkedIn post about client management, or any polite conversation about the realities of working internationally: sometimes, you will have to correct the English of native English speakers. And they will not thank you for it.
One of my American clients — charming, passionate, absolutely certain of himself — had a small but consistent relationship with the hyphen that I can only describe as creative. Not wrong in an obvious way. Wrong in a confident way, which is somehow worse.
We’re talking about a hospitality business. Packages. Stays. The kind of copy that lives on landing pages and booking widgets. Standard stuff — except that every single compound modifier came out looking like it had been hyphened by someone who once heard that hyphens existed and decided to go all in.
Not 3-day, 4-night stays — which is correct, clean, and what every style guide on earth agrees on — but something closer to 3 day-4 night-stays, rearranged with a confidence I genuinely respect on a human level, even as it made my left eye twitch professionally.
I corrected it. He corrected my correction. I cited the AP Stylebook. He cited his thirty years of writing emails.
We reached a compromise, the way you always do in these situations: his version went live, and I updated my portfolio notes accordingly.
But the hyphens were only the opening act. The real showstopper was his philosophy on exclamation points — a philosophy that, I would come to learn, operated on a double standard so breathtaking it deserves its own case study.
In his promotional emails, exclamation points were not punctuation. They were atmosphere. The more, the merrier. The more, the classier, apparently.
Book your dream vacation today!!! Limited availability — don’t miss out!!! We can’t wait to host you!!!
I want to be very clear: this man was not ironic. He was not doing a bit. He genuinely believed that three exclamation points read as polished and professional — the kind of thing that screams established brand rather than unsolicited coupon email from a company you vaguely remember opting into in 2011.
And yet, on separate occasions, when it suited him, he would slip into full grammar professor mode. Not consistently. Not systematically. Just — whenever the mood struck — he would pause mid-conversation and deliver a correction with the calm authority of someone who had definitely, at some point, taken a class about this.
The corrections were confident. They were delivered with a kind of generous patience, the way someone explains something obvious to someone they’ve decided is a little slow. They were also, more often than not, wrong — or at best, based on a rule he had half-remembered from somewhere and chosen to apply selectively, like a seasoning he only uses on other people’s food.
Being a non-native speaker in these moments is a special kind of experience. You know he’s wrong. You can feel it. You have the receipts — the style guides, the references, the AP Stylebook bookmarked and ready. But there’s a social choreography to correcting someone who is correcting you, and it requires more patience than any grammar rule ever will.
So you smile. You nod. You go look it up, confirm what you already knew, and update the copy quietly, correctly, without fanfare.
The exclamation points, meanwhile, remained. All of them. Unbothered.
Chapter Three: A Note on the American Entrepreneurial Personality
I say this with love, because I have genuine affection for American hustle culture — it’s infectious, it’s cinematic, it’s the reason half of the world’s most interesting companies exist.
But there is a specific strain of American entrepreneur that operates on pure momentum and zero feedback. They confuse motion with progress. They mistake volume for value. They have read exactly enough business books to be dangerous and not quite enough to be humble.
These are the clients who pitch you a timeshare tour travel package with the energy of someone announcing the iPhone. Who describe their multilevel marketing structure — and yes, we all know what it is, the math is visible from space — as “a revolutionary network-based revenue model” with a straight face and a slide deck. Who have discovered that social media exists and have concluded that followers are the metric by which all success is measured.
We need to go viral. I want ten thousand followers by next month. Can you make content that gets us a lot of engagement?
Sure. And while I’m at it, let me also reverse climate change and teach your cat to do taxes. Because follower counts divorced from strategy, offer, and retention are just vanity metrics wearing a business casual outfit. A brand with fifty thousand followers and nothing to sell is just a popular empty room.
I have watched clients pour real money — good money, money that could have funded a functional ad campaign or a decent CRM setup — into chasing an audience that was never going to convert, because the goal was never clearly defined beyond “more.”
More what? More engagement. More reach. More what for?
Silence. A thoughtful look. A follow-up about Reels.
Chapter Four: The Feed That Time Forgot
And then there are the clients who once trusted you — really trusted you — and somewhere along the way, decided they had it from here.
I had a Brazilian client. Sharp, detail-oriented, the kind of person who would review fifteen photos from a single session to find the one where the light hit exactly right. We’re talking about a proper camera — iPhone Pro, the kind of lens that makes you look like you actually know what you’re doing — and she had an eye for it. She cared. It showed.
That was then.
Now, her Instagram feed looks like it was designed by someone who found Facetune during a fever dream and decided restraint was for other people. The skin smoothing is turned up to a setting I didn’t know existed. She has the complexion of modeling clay — perfectly even, utterly textureless, hovering somewhere between human and very advanced avatar. The filters have removed not just blemishes but also, seemingly, the concept of pores, shadows, and any evidence of being a biological organism.
And the content itself? The grid, which we once carefully curated together, now reads like a supermarket flyer from a parallel universe where Comic Sans is considered elegant. Bright backgrounds. Mismatched fonts. Text boxes that were clearly designed by dragging a finger across a phone screen at speed. Stickers. Drop shadows on the drop shadows.
The whole thing was built inside the Instagram app. Which is fine for a story. For a grid, it is a crime.
I have not said anything. There is nothing to say. She made her choices, as is her right. I have simply added her account to a personal folder I keep called “Before & After (Not the Good Kind).”
The Part Where I Say Something Constructive
Here’s the thing about all of this — and I mean it genuinely, not in a “stay positive!” way that itself belongs in a promotional email with three exclamation points:
The work still gets done. The briefs get delivered. The files go out. And somewhere in the wreckage of every over-punctuated, under-thought, badly-hyphened project, there’s usually one element that survived intact — a line of copy, a layout decision, a color choice — that you can quietly claim as your own.
You learn to present your recommendations with data, not opinions. You document everything. You pick your battles with strategy, not ego. You let go of what you can’t control and protect what you can.
And then you come back to your own website — the one you’re building entirely on your own terms, with no one to tell you the quotes need to stay — and you remember why you loved this in the first place.
That, and you write a very long blog post about it.
— Filipe Carvalho Web Developer · CRM Specialist · Fluent in English, Unfortunately Including Other People’s