(a blazing stream of expletives)

I often wonder about the sanity of our clients. The Estate Agents in particular do sometimes focus on their brand at the expense of the properties they are - supposedly - attempting to market to the homebuyer. I say 'supposedly' because, of course, marketing to the homebuyer couldn't be further from their minds... Oh, no. They're marketing to each other: "Look at me: I have this property for £3.5M... Ner ner ner!"

So when one such client has a property going for over £10M, and wants a bespoke ad - not on their usual template - with (and here I quote) "va-va-voom", it seems like a good opportunity to really make use of the photos they sent. And they were great photos - any one of the nine pictures supplied could have run across a whole double-page spread with no loss of quality.

And, being something out of the ordinary, jobs like this do tend to come to me. I spent about 45 minutes to an hour around lunchtime today fixing the images, and then fine-tuning the layout that basically designed itself as soon as I perused the images...

...and then, right at the end of the day, the client responded with changes.

Apparently they wanted it on their usual advertising template after all, using only 5 of the 9 images... and they wanted the ad to make it (again, I quote) "look like a property worth £10M".

Gentle reader, if I were to say that this client - who shall remain nameless - has one of the plainest, most unattractive templates, and that even printing the text in gold leaf wouldn't make any of their properties look like they were worth £10M... would I merely sound bitter?

Then allow me to describe, in brief, the ad I put together. Imagine, if you will, a photo of the open front door to a very expensive property in London. This occupies 90% of the double-page spread, but with the remaining 8 photos displayed, in a column, over about half to two-thirds of the second page (where the building's rather plain frontage would otherwise be visible). The text they supplied - frankly too much for what they were trying to achieve - was spread about on both pages: the name of the property and a couple of short, descriptive paragraphs on the left, and the bulleted list of main features on the far right. Their logo and address details were present at a reasonable size on the righthand page.

I don't consider myself to be a Designer, but my boss - with a long job history of high-end design work within some very prestigious companies - reckoned it was a good piece of work, and I actually liked what I'd done for a change.

In retrospect, I can see why the client might want to cut some of the photos, simply to allow those remaining a greater prominence on the page... but to stick to their template?

I did a similar thing for a different Agent a few months ago and, while the deviation from template scared that client (I believe they actually phrased it that way themselves), they at least appreciated what I'd done, and simply asked for more of their corporate livery to be in evidence on the page. The essence of the ad remained in the final version.

But these guys... Seriously, if this is how they see their advertising, they have no business acting as Agents for properties "worth £10M".

Fuckwits.