If you’re going to comment on this, PLEASE read what’s already been stated a dozen times.

She’ll pick up some work from it perhaps. But there’ll be a lot more potential customers who won’t touch her with a 10-foot pole. Why risk the possibility that your designer will cause you to be held up publicly for attack.

This Mike guy sounds like a nightmare.

Anyway, I agree, they’re both coming out of this looking bad.

Imagine you’re Rachel and you were hired to redesign a fairly large and popular site. You’ve designed many sites before and usually you get to actually design most aspects of it from color, to layout, to font, etc.

However, Mike wants you to mostly just implement his own ideas. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Rachel should have backed out earlier if she didn’t want it like that.

Anyway, you’re Rachel and you design the site to Mike’s specifications. Once the site goes live, BOOM, a LARGE outcry from people that don’t like the new design. Being a class act, you (as Rachel) decide to not flat out blame Mike, so you bite the bullet and take some heat for a design that you probably would have done completely different.

Now, in the middle of this huge uproar of people bagging on the design, your client (Mike) posts a screenshot of a different design and says he’ll probably go with some of those ideas.

What does this do? It’s a HUGE slap in Rachel’s face. She did her best to not blame Mike for the bad design, and Mike didn’t really defend her (though it appears he did a little). With the drama unfolding all over the place, the way he posted the screenshot made it look like (to some) that he was agreeing that Rachel did a poor job and that the author of the screenshot could do much better. Worse, it could potentially hurt Rachel’s reputation.

Whew… anyway, with all that said. I still believe Rachel went about it entirely wrong as her own actions ended up being very similar to Mike’s when she posted her resignation publically, which is a slap in Mike’s face and hurts his rep.

And what’s wrong with hiring a designer but being able to override some of their ideas? Isn’t that how it works? I certainly wouldn’t hire a designer and give them full control over the site, even if it was 37 Signals.

This whole thing makes me wary of hiring a designer for fear there’s some deep, dark Designer’s Code I’m unfamiliar with and in danger of offending.

I would not want to risk having Rachel publically quit on me before talking with me first, no matter how good a designer she may be.

However, with that said, I do realize that we are probably only getting 1/100th the information.

First, Rachel should have resigned at the beginning if she didn’t want to take on a project for a client that was pretty much just doing what he told her.

Second, Mike should have talked with Rachel more and probably shouldn’t have posted the screenshot of the other design like he did. It seems innocent, especially from his last comment, but the way he presented it did make it look like he was going to start merging someone else’s design elements with Rachel’s.

Third, Rachel should have talked with Mike privately before doing a public resignation. Though it seems she had a lot of class through most of this ordeal, by making her client see her resignation for the first time on a public post takes a lot away from her professionalism IMO.

Honestly, the way it stands now, it doesn’t seem like Mike did anything wrong, nor did Rachel really. It seems like a pretty large misunderstanding that would have been better settled if either one would have taken the time to discuss it in private more.

But then again, perhaps there’s a whole lot more going on privately that we don’t know about… I dunno.