the thing that made me angry...

I have a couple of things that I’ve been upset about lately. I’ve been thinking about them endlessly for the last couple of days. Not sure that I will be able to get the point across as to just how angry the one makes me and just how disappointed the other makes me. The story about the thing that disappointed me will be in another post. This post will deal with the thing that is grinding me at the moment.

I’m still having a hard time as to whether it’s something that I “should” be angry about, or should I just swallow my pride and let it be.

You may remember from a previous post (application submitted...) from February 11, that we were asked by the Victorian Festival Committee to work on this years posters and fliers for the festival. We agreed to add this to our already crazily-busy schedule because it's good to get involved in the community.

We worked on these posters and fliers, putting other things aside, because we were told that they needed the posters by the end of March.

They supplied us with the images; a Victorian woman and an old town scene, and the event list. Both images were sketches, with a yellowy antiqued background. I thought a cute idea would be a theme of “silent movie”. So, I looked on-line for a special font (Silentina) and researched how a silent movie slide would look. Seems that a silent movie slide is black, sometimes fading to white in the middle (because of age) – they usually have a frame or a border and they are simple.

We used this idea to create 4 posters; 2 with white backgrounds and 2 with the dark background that fades to white in the middle.

In order to have the look we were going for, Jerome had to use his computer talents to remove the yellowy antiqued background from the sketches so that the sketches would be only black and white. That took some time and effort.
We took them to the Committee Meeting on March 10 and got nothing but praise…no major changes.

A week later, we went to the printers and had her (Christine) print out some trial posters. Made some updates, but all in all we liked how they looked. Sent her an email with the requirements and expected that before long, the posters would be printed.

Then we needed final approval on the fliers since they had the majority of the information on them; the map and the events of the day. We met up with the organizers; Sue and Janine. They had a lot of updates and changes for the flier. We went home and were done with the updates the next day and sent the .pdfs to the printer.

In the meantime, had another Committee Meeting…more additions to the flier.

It took another week before the printer had 500 fliers for us to pick up. Jerome called and told her that we would be picking them up on Friday and was informed that Sue had already picked them up and had mentioned some issues with the font size. However, Sue would still use what we had to drop off at the few events that she would be attending that weekend.

I already started feeling at this point like my toes were getting stepped on. I felt that up until this point, Jerome and I were taking care of all the poster, flier, printer responsibilities and I was pretty insulted that Sue would take it upon herself to pick up and then judge the quality of the fliers. By the way, we still didn’t have the posters! Remember, we had sent the .pdfs to the printer on March 17 – it was now April 3.

The next Monday when we got home from work, Sue and Janine were in our driveway. They were dropping off a flier and poster with all kinds of marks all over them. So, as soon as we walked in the door, I was on the computer making the changes so that we could send the files to the printer.

Jerome suggested to include in this email the PowerPoint files as well as the .pdfs so that if they need to lighten something or darken something, they could do it on the fly.

Fast forward to this past Tuesday; another Committee Meeting. We arrived a few minutes late. I immediately noticed that Sue had passed out the latest fliers. They were completely different from what we submitted. Yes, they still had the border that we created and one of the two types of fonts, but the list of events, the other font (Silentina) and the layout were all different. I said immediately “oh, you changed the orientation”…Sue said, I didn’t change the orientation, the printer did.

I got a better look and the map on the back was almost the same, only things that were different were the font and the shading.

I spent a lot of energy telling myself to let it go. I could barely concentrate on the meeting. Then I noticed a big pile of posters in all different colors of paper. We had told the printer pale yellow and lavender for the posters that had white backgrounds and white paper for the posters that had the darker background. These posters were dark yellow, dark purple and dark green. As the meeting came to a close and Sue was handing over the posters to Janine – it seemed to me that she was hiding them from my view. I asked “could we see how the final posters turned out”. Oh yes, sure. The printer only used one of the four we sent her and she incorporated both sketches into one – she moved everything around - she didn’t use the font and it just looked overly busy, messy.

Sue said they decided on only one poster, "the one with the dark background looked like a negative". We said in unison, "that was the point". The rest of the Committee Members laughed. Sue then said the printer had to recreate the whole poster. That she didn't have PowerPoint. This was not true. But she did screw up the nice k.i.s.s. (keep it simple, stupid) design that we did.

I just can’t get over it and even while I’m writing this, I’m getting so angry. We worked on those posters and fliers for hours. We were told over a month ago that everything looked so fantastic.

Jerome said as we were leaving that he is happy because now that they have all the files, they can make updates and we don’t have to be involved at all. We don’t have to attend any more meetings and we don’t have to go to the Festival if we do not want to. Plus, they can use our “base” for whatever they need in the future.

Since this post is so long, I had decided that I would not mention the complete disorganization of the meetings and agendas. It will be just amazing if they can really pull this event off.

Comments

Jan Marie said…
A friend of mine once told me this...."Don't let people rent space in your head."

What it means is don't let people take up time in your thoughts.

I was 'used' like that once, well really I was stupid it took me 4 times before I said, "I don't have time this year." Not one thank you and others took the credit.

I love how some people can so easily take credit for others hard work. I guess if I was a philosophical person I would say.."You should feel sorry for her (them whoever) because they didn't have the talent and needed you to do the work." But I'm not philosophical so I say "screw them."

Next time you might think about copyrighting your original work. This would keep people or printers from stealing your ideas.

It's a shame people can't be more upfront and honest.

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