You thought PITA was bad? Try PICA!

“The client is always right, even when they have no defined vision.”

This is a fun constant in the design world, and when it works in favor of the designer, they profit by the bucketload, either in billable hours or, in the case of in-housers, the six-day design vacation at your desk as the boss frets whether the font color should be white or green.

But that fun comes to an end quickly when you hear the phrase, “I don’t know what I like, but I’ll know it when I see it.” Perhaps you’ve never actually heard those words, but I have….I heard them with the boss standing behind me, hands folded, waiting for me to crack open the file and start designing. Their beady little eyes, staring at the back of your head, searching for flakes from dry scalp…the horror…THE HORROR!

Sorry…flashback.

Where was I? Oh, oh yeah, as I write for BoDo, I think to myself “Well, this must be great, a design business online! No back-of-head staring, no hemming and hawing meetings, how paradisiacal (it’s a word, trust me) can THAT be?

And then it occurs to me that online collaboration has the potential to be ten times worse.

“But Tom,” you ask, marveling at my genius and innate sex appeal while simultaneously wondering if I’ll ask you to hang out with me “Why would that be worse?”

And the answer is…PICA.

Ah yes, PICA, the worst of all online design diseases. PICA is subtle and insidious, like belly-button lint and fingerprints on your glasses. Suddenly it’s all over you and it won’t stop.

A relative of PiTA, PICA attacks unexpectedly and viciously, grinding you to a halt. PICA: Passive-aggressive Internet Conflict Avoidance. Like a plague it seeps through your emails, with such phrases as “Please make ten variations and email them.” And “We’re going into a meeting and we’re going to discuss this very issue,” and my personal favorite. “It’s still on somebody else’s desk.”

Here’s how it starts: They ask, you design, they look, they like it but they don’t like it and they either don’t know how to criticize or they designed this really cool logo with a swish in it and they’ve been sending you telepathic messages and you won’t listen to them. So you email them with a “Just touching base with you,” and they freeze up. They believe that if they say “we hate your ideas,” then there’s a possibility of the designer getting huffy and quitting, thus restarting the process. They ALSO know that given the advent of technology, the ability to stall people on decision-making has virtually quintupled. And as a result, all they have to do is stall you. You can’t prove that they’re stalling. You’re not likely to show up in person, and the worst that can happen is that you call and get the message machine.

Online services are indeed the wave of the future, but riding atop that wave is a whole herd of PICAs hungry to sludge your creative pipes. BE VIGILANT! Be wary, B-postive.

’nuff said.

Thomas (Tom) Stephan | Director of Something Clever
BoDo Author | Dyer Straits