About a week ago, a design acquaintance of mine mentioned Clients From Hell on Twitter. Although I consider myself very lucky on balance, with the vast majority of my clients being great, everyone in the industry has horror stories to tell. Clients From Hell is a place for anonymous contributions, and had me transfixed and also laughing at stories that mirrored some of my own experiences: clients who think that because they could really do something themselves, they shouldn’t have to pay you to do it for them; people who want you to design something despite not being able to supply any kind of brief; unrealistic businesspeople who want the moon on a stick for next to nothing.

But having followed this blog for a few days via RSS, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with it. Horror stories are all very well, but I’m under the impression that some of these clients from hell have had the misfortune to deal with designers from hell.

Part of the problem of the blog is that there’s no context. So while it’s amusing to laugh at the ‘stupid client’ who said “the unicorns don’t look realistic enough”, that statement could make perfect sense. Unicorns are fictional, but they’re basically horses with a horn. Was the response to the unicorns in the design simply down to them not looking like horses? If so, that’s pretty efficient criticism from the client, not something to joke about.

Elsewhere, design snobbery is rife on the blog, and that’s quite depressing. If anything, it shows how many designers take their knowledge for granted and don’t take the time to explain the obvious to clients (or at least ensure they understand certain things). There are several posts ridiculing clients who respond to ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder text negatively, but outside of the design world, who knows what this is? If you don’t make your clients aware that the text in mock-up designs is gobbledygook, how are they to know something hasn’t gone wrong?

And so it goes: a client wants a “darker black”, which is something almost everyone in the print industry must have said to printers at some point; another can’t find the shade of blue they want in the Photoshop colour picker—a hugely complex visual device for someone who’s not used it before; someone asks a designer to innovate by adding Flash animation to an email newsletter—not an outlandish request for someone not involved in web technology on a day-to-day basis; a banner is measured on-screen by someone else, which makes perfect sense if you’ve never worked with pixels in a design package; and one comment is from a client saying an iStockPhoto watermark doesn’t add anything visually, but were they informed that stock images, until purchased, are watermarked?

A designer’s job isn’t just to design—it’s to communicate. But this doesn’t just mean communicating the client’s message to an audience—you must also communicate with your client, and ensure they understand what you’re doing and what’s technically feasible. Laughing at someone who doesn’t share your technical knowledge doesn’t make you a great designer—in fact, it rather makes you the opposite.