Design Tales from the Dark Side – The Client Who Wanted Cool

SEATTLE, October 2006
It was a dark and stormy night when the phone rang. I pulled the cigarette from my teeth and reached for the phone. Actually, no. I don’t smoke.

And besides it was a perfectly mild mid-afternoon when my email inbox said “PING!” I opened the message, read it and dollar signs appeared in both of my eyes. Someone, we’ll call him “Jake”, wanted a new logo and I was just the man for it.

And thus begun one of my toughest and most time-consuming cases ever. The job was simple: design a logo for this gentleman’s SEO company. That’s about all I knew when I accepted the project and by the end, I …