How to Navigate Tough, Awkward and Hard Client and Work Situations in the Creative Fields

We will work through several different real case studies and examples of difficult working situations and I will show you how to handle each one.

Let’s just admit one thing to each other, clients can suck. Clients or employers can suck the creativity, motivation and passion right out of us but in some cases we need to find ways to power through those situations to create great work.

In other cases, it might be wise to quit or fire the client, and we will talk about some of those situations, too. There is a lot to unpack here, and this one might be a bit more emotional than other articles I have written, but I am hoping these situations will help you know a few things:

1.) You are not alone in these tough situations. Rarely can we find a creative who loves everyone they work for, for their entire career. I am hoping these real stories can help you relate to and find solace with others.

2.) That there are solutions to almost every situation. You can be professional and take the high road but still value yourself as a person and creative powerhouse.

3.) There are specific ways you can phrase your words and sentences that can help defuse tough and difficult situations. You can even copy and paste some of my client responses, to use my response as a template if you ever run into something similar.

4.) Sometimes it can be hard to know if we are being gaslighted and led down a long road of abuse by a client. There will be situations I will discuss that are NOT ok to live with, even if the money is good. I am hoping by the end of this article you can easily define your boundaries and limits as a creative.

So let’s get started.

Some of the tough situations we will discuss (not all, but a highlighted list).

1.) Client ghosting. Yes, we have all had disappearing clients. The more frustrating ones are the ones that ghost you AFTER you completed a lot of the work and sometimes ALL of the work. How do we deal with this and how do we prevent this?

2.) Firing Clients. When is enough, enough? Even if they pay well that is no excuse for them to treat us without the professional courtesy we deserve. There will be a situation or two where a student of mine set their boundaries and fired a client. I will start out with my own experience with a client of 10 years that I should have fired years prior.

3.) Client keeps requesting changes. We will ALL run into this issue of clients wanting to take the creative reigns from us. How do we prevent this from happening in the first place? I have a student story of how a client kept requesting changes and the project felt like it never was going to end, frustrating the creative.

4.) Time pressures that are insane. “We need a website and a full brand design by tomorrow.” Sometimes we accept jobs without defining our timelines on both sides. We will talk about a real situation and I will layout ways you can prevent this from happening to you.

5.) Client is not sending me all of the info on time. There will be another student story where a client of theirs sent only half of the required information but still expected the project to be moving forward. I will talk about what we can say to the client in this tough moment.

My own personal struggles with clients starts at day one.

One of my first clients was someone I found on an online small business forum. They were a lawn mowing company and I decided I was not skilled enough to really be properly paid (I felt like I was just getting started with design), so I charged them $10 for the logo. I took it really seriously as it was my first job and spent countless hours creating lots of concepts, I even created one that was fully 3D (This was 2008 so that was kind of a big deal and took a lot of time.)

In the end they kept changing things up on me asking for things totally unconnected with the concepts I was first coming up with. I had no client questionnaire or onboarding process at the time, I just took a sentence or two they wrote on what they needed and leaped right into the creative process. Who can blame me? No one really taught me the right way to pursue client work and I was treating my design work like a hobby and not a real business.

After 10 hours of work I submitted to the client my final logo design files and he sent me $10 via paypal.

I did not get paid enough for my logo but I think the real value was the lessons I learned. I identified issues with the entire process and decided to slowly tweak my process so I can charge more and have a smoother process. If not, I could easily have quit being a designer and could be working an office job making copies for a boring presentation in a room with no windows.

The point of this first story is there are things we can do to prevent a lot of these clients issues. Some of the issues that come up with clients we cannot help and some we can. Issues could be directly related to poor client education on the design process or issues with just not knowing the right process to follow based on experience in the field. Lastly, some issues you should not have to deal with because you are not being treated properly.

The sad situation is a lot of you are working with anyone who comes your way, not because you want to but because you have to. Some of you are struggling to pay your bills and just need work and, because of this, poor quality clients are a common issue even among higher paying clients.

Client Situation #1 - Client keeps making design changes that are just not good.

This real client story from a student happens all too often and is an easy segway from the similar story above. I got permission from the student to share the following story:

Hi everyone! I'm hoping for some advice here. I'm still working on my first logo commission right now, but I am running into a problem where my client keeps veering off on tangents. Every time I make changes that he requests, he tells me he likes a different idea instead and then I try to adjust the logo based on his thoughts/comments.

Problem is he keeps doing it, and frankly... these newer ideas and thoughts look terrible in comparison to the original logo(s) I had designed earlier. I've tried telling him as much but he seems dead set on continuing to alter the design and going in a direction that's quite a bit different than what he originally wanted.

Maybe I am just worrying over nothing, but I'm not sure what to do in this situation. At some point I just can't keep going with this job, but I also don't want to lose out on the money since it is a paying job, after all. As a result of this constant back and forth and trying to please my client, I am behind the schedule I had put together in our contract, too. Ugh.

I dunno what to do. Has anyone experienced this sort of thing? What did you do, or do you do, in these situations? Thanks!

Clients can sometimes think they are creatives.

This can be a problem when they are not. As working creatives we have a lot of experience working through concepts and ideas by sketching them out, brainstorming, mind mapping and various other methods to try to narrow down our ideas. We have done this many times before and, just like learning a sport, the more time we have with it the better we become.

Clients may not have had much experience with the creative process and may not know how to respect that creative flow. They have underestimated the heaviness of the task and may discount it as “easy”. There are two ways in which I think we can handle this issue.

1.) Preventive Measures: You cannot go back in time but what you can put in place is a workflow chart that educates the client on your creative process. I decided to write up an example below for this article on how I think it could go (feel free to steal this or modify it to your needs).

This does a few things: This lets the client know when their feedback and ideas are most needed. Hint: It is almost always toward the very start of the project. Many times creatives forget to ask the right questions before starting the brainstorming process. This leads to concepts falling flat and clients stepping in with all sorts of ideas. Having a process, a client chat or questionnaire helps to establish project expectations.

2.) Adding a few clauses to your contract: This is also a preventive measure that can help protect you from “project scope creep”. It is simply adding a paragraph that defines what the project scope is ahead of time and defining what happens if the project goes longer or requires more additional revisions.

Some creatives add two or three rounds worth of going “back and forth” with concepts and ideas while others add specific hourly time frames to each step in the process. In your contract you can define what happens financially if a project goes well outside of these defined parameters. Usually, it is an additional hourly charge for each hour spent outside of the project.

If the client has to pay to “get more creative” and add tons of new ideas for you once they have already established a starting direction then they may think twice.

3.) Establish yourself as a trusted professional: What is happening in this case is the creative is not being properly trusted and treated as an industry expert. Creatives are like electricians. Sure there are many ways to wire a house but only a few ways are the most optimal and will have the best results and the lowest costs. Most people trust electricians because the knowledge the everyday person has in that field is pretty low.

What creatives and designers need to do is establish themselves as industry experts. You can do that through writing blog posts, showing off your creative process on social media. This can also mean treating your relationship with the client differently. We have a tendency to be client led but not led by ourselves. This can be due to feeling self conscious or not having enough experience. This can be due to the fact that creatives have been given less “power” in client relationships.

You need to build trust with the client so that your recommendations are valued above their own. You are indeed the paid trusted professional in this matter, correct?

What do you do after the fact?

This poor person is stuck right in the middle of a sticky situation and some of these recommendations are for before the project starts. Here is my advice for what they can do right now to salvage the situation.

They already started down the rabbit hole of doing revision after revision but also taking all of their ideas and not having pushback. Now is the time to pushback with a gentle, yet firm, e-mail.

“Dear client,

After several rounds of revisions to the project we need to make sure we are on the same creative page. This will prevent further time erosion and will allow you to move forward with your goals for your company. I would encourage a voice call or video chat to hammer out one final last concept that we can explore. You have had some interesting ideas but we need to make sure those ideas can be executed well in their final forms (key phrase here!). There are some concerns I have about the creative direction this was headed in and wanted to address those directly outside of e-mail. I want this project to have a really positive response by all parties involved and want to makes sure both of investments in the projects is maximized.”

Now, we hope this ends well and they can come to an agreement in their next interaction but there is a small chance the client will have an issue with the creative not doing everything they suggest. This is the point where you may have to forfeit your time invested and get out before this ends poorly. You have to know when to quit and when a client is being unreasonable. Some clients will, frankly, be immature and no amount of client education will work.

Client Situation #2 - Client Ghosts a $7,000 Bill!

Oh, ghosting. It is funny how clients go silent right when it is time to get paid. This happened to me more than once and it was so disturbing, frustrating, and yes, I cried. If you cannot reach them then your money is gone. The emotional tool of trying to reach them everyday for weeks is equally troubling. It is a common but harsh reality. I am going to share with you a real story from a student below with a similar situation.

“One client disappeared from a freelancing site and didn’t pay his £7.8k bill! Site wouldn’t give me his details without employing a lawyer first when I finally did they said they didn’t have his details on file…

I did it on a per hourly basis (initially he deposited £300) we initially agreed to have them pay every 2 weeks he missed the first payment then agreed to pay after a month then missed that too. Then totally went silent.. I just told him I couldn’t possibly continue work without being paid the site (people per hour) agreed with me but then (after a year of me asking for his details and giving me the go around) turned round and said nothing we can do because it’s your responsibility to take an upfront deposit… I got the £300 deposit also spent more money on assets than the deposit was so I was kinda screwed over…

This person used a third party freelancing site to help protect themself from this happening and it still did! Do not let your guard down at anytime working with clients that are “unestablished” no matter how big they say their company is. This is also a call for you to develop longer term relationships with established clients so more of your work can be within a trusted group of people. This will reduce client stress and help stabilize your income. Until then, there are things you can do to try to prevent this from happening to you.

1.) Never allow a client to miss a payment deadline: This one is hard because I am a nice person. I like to give grace to other humans and in some ways I am a people pleaser which makes this rule hard. I think we are all scared when we first start out of losing a client. This is mostly because we are worried of losing what little income we have. We tend to bend rules as not to scare off the client from finishing the project.

Clients will come up with all sorts of excuses as way they cannot make a payment.

“I will have the money later after a big contract is finished”
”I have money tied up but I will have some soon”
”My startup is needing more money than I realized”
”My mom is in the hospital and I am running out of money”
”My dog needs surgery”

Those last two listed are hard on my people-pleasing heart. I quickly want to throw this rule out the window and “give them a break” but that is the last thing we need to do. Make sure clients continue to meet payment deadlines or work will stop immediately until payment is settled. We also have really important bills to pay and families to support.

2.) Establish clear payment gateways in your contract: You have a contract right? Well this is another reason why having one is helpful. Make sure to create payment deadlines as projects unfold. This is most helpful when the project scope is longer. In this example it was a website design project which in some cases can take months. Every two weeks payment would not be unheard of for this project type. Do not go a month or more without some sort of client billing or payment.

3.) Create a 50% downpayment requirement before a project can start.
This seems like a high amount, and you may fear scaring away a client, but this is the golden rule in freelancing. This makes sure the client is serious about the project and the financial commitment that is ahead for them.

What do you do after the fact?

This is unsolvable. The client has disappeared and there is no recourse with the third party website they were using. I am glad they at least got £300 but it sounds like they spent more than that on some of the project files they needed. They LOST money in the end and all of that time.

This situation is now more about managing mental health. These types of situations can end freelancing careers because of the emotional toll of it all. They will need to recognize this as a learning opportunity and know their lesson will help others prevent this devastating situation. The temptation is to continue to hunt them down but there is a point where that may become unfruitful. The hardest part is to finally admit that money will never come. We tend to hold on to that hope longer than we need to and allowing yourself to let that entire project go and focus on the next one is easier said than done.

Client Situation #3 - Unpaid Trial Based Job Applications.

This has been a big issue lately. I hear from so many students about applying for design jobs to only be met with this HUGE trial project (usually unpaid) they have to complete and be judged on.

From the employer’s side I get it— they want to taste the milk before they buy the cow. They want zero risk in the hiring process and they want to ensure they are getting someone who has the right style. Here is the thing. THAT IS WHAT PORTFOLIOS ARE FOR! What a wonderful opportunity employers have being able to get a glimpse of our process and unique creative directions by looking at our portfolios.

It reminds me of another student situation below:

“I was recently thinking of switching to another job. In the last round, they have given an assignment, in which i have to complete logo design, branding, website design, social media posters and flyers and even banners in just 2 days!!! Don’t you think thats too much work for such short duration? How can creativity be time bound? What do you all think? Should i tell them after a decent attempt at it that the time is too short?? Any suggestions or advice are welcome”

Wow, what an assignment! I am not sure if the employer is trying to scare off talented designers, or just seeing who is serious, but this is over the line. This would be a hard NO from me and how I would reply to the employer here will be below. The caveat to my response is the rare time a potential employer will paid you for tests or trial projects. This can happen but it is so rare I wonder if I should mention it. This response is for free unpaid trial projects that go overboard with time requirements. Anything beyond a few hours of time is outrageous and unnecessary. In some cases projects created during trials can be used without your permission and sold for profit. There are many fraudulent people pretending to be employers with a job luring in designers so they can get free work.

“Dear Potential Employer,

I have really enjoyed the interview process so far and found some great connection points within your company. I came across an e-mail that had a request for a mock trial or client project. I noticed the time requirement for the project would exceed the amount given to complete the task. I am also concerned about the breadth of the project with it including so many different design items that need to be completed in full. I am happy to complete the project if I can be compensated for my time. I am also able to do one or two of the projects presented as a trial but not all. I can create the best work within the confines of a reasonable timeline.

I also want to remind you that my portfolio contains many different project types and styles if you wanted to get a feeling for my overall creative abilities. Here is a link to my portfolio below and let me know if you have any questions. I am a team player and like to be open about how I feel about situations and properly outline my boundaries as a creative. I hope that could be considered a valuable asset to your company.

We did a few things with this e-mail:

1.) Defined our boundaries: We all have boundaries but many of us refuse to protect them.

2.) We continue to highlight our best qualities: This e-mail continues to push us forward as candidate by showing that saying “no” could actually be a good thing.

3.) Highlighting our portfolio: We direct the employer to continue to explore our portfolio.

If we want to say “no” to a lot of trial projects we need to have a great solid portfolio that does all the work for us. I have written an extensive article on portfolio building right here on my substack if you want to check it out.

Client Situation #4 - Client wants something that seems impossible.

Based on a true student story.

“Ugh. This one will always haunt me. I was just starting out in the corporate life, and was working on a trade show booth for Europe. It was my first BIG project. The client wanted me to create an image of a guy standing and looking into a smart mirror with a bunch of greenery surrounding. So I did that, but the mirror was “not mirror enough” even though I used a literal image of a mirror. It was a 12 rounds of revising until they decided to just go a different route. In my opinion, the image was fine. But they were looking for something that was unattainable. I even asked the rest of the design team what they thought it meant by needing to be “more mirror”, they had no clue.”

It was the best lesson for understanding what kinds of things I needed to ask my client before going into a project and setting expectations right away rather than going into this back and forth forever.

This reminds me a bit of client situation #1. A client once again cannot clearly communicate what they are looking for. The designer did try, it sounds like they went through 12 rounds of revisions. In the end, no amount of client communication was going to get this designer to the end goal.

It seems as if the client was looking for an effect that was not possible given the project restraints. It could be that the client was looking for a more complex effect, perhaps a physical mirror that would need to be custom cut to fit the display or they were looking for a holographic effect. In the end it does not matter because it was not a realistic request and this does happen. There is a good chance they moved on to a different designer to also be met with the same challenges.

I had this happen to me once on a website design project.

The client was looking for an effect on the homepage that required so much custom coding and work it would never fit his budget. This left the client really disappointed. We ended up working out a semi-solution but the client had to come to the table with a compromise and be ok with his vision for this animated homepage to be more realistic.

That is where a compromise needs to happen. A communication has to be sent that calls the client to meet halfway or more clearly discuss their end goal expectations. “Not mirror enough” had to become a more detailed and refined statement or further work cannot be completed. You can remind them that the better data you feed to a designer the better your results, and this also reduces the time it takes for you to complete the project.

Also, like the recommendation in the first client situation, having a well established creative work flow that involves the client at the start can be most helpful.

Do you want to share a strange, difficult or awkward client situation? Make sure to share in the comments below. I am hoping to continue to write more on this topic.

Client Situation #5 - Company would lie to clients about how much time is dedicated to them.

Based on a true student story:

“I worked at an agency where clients were allocated 2 hours per day of a designer's time. (It was actually only 1 but my bosses lied to all clients!)

I had this one client who wouldn't get in touch with me all week, then would assume he could use all of his time in one big "chunk". So he'd ask me to do a huge task and when I pushed back saying "sorry, that's not going to be a 24-hour turnaround but I can show you a work-in-progress tomorrow", he'd get really mad and go on about how he wasn't getting what he was paying for. He also wasn't the only person in THAT ONE COMPANY asking me to do things.

I'd be sat in a call with him just telling me he's paying all this money and not getting the level of service, and I couldn't even tell him he was being lied to and that I had to do 16 hours worth of design/video work with 8 clients in one day, every day, on top of being an account manager.

Probably one of the worst places I've worked but it taught me to stand up for myself in future jobs.”

Not all employers are going to treat you and their clients well. She was stuck in a poor unhealthy work environment working over 16 hours a day. The agency did not clearly outline expectations to the client and it left the clients desiring work beyond the capacity the agency had.

Have you ever been bumped off a plane flight? How did that make you feel? You paid on time for your ticket like everyone else and you might even have booked your flight months ago. The airline over promised and under delivered and it leaves everyone with a sour taste in their mouth. They could not fit everyone on the plane with the ticket and they knowingly do this in hopes not everyone shows up for the flight.

I find this is the perfect analogy with how the client felt. They wanted more because they were promised more. The poor designer got caught right in the middle of that expectation and had to be the bearer of bad news. This is poor agency management at play and it is shame the designer had to take the brunt of the client’s anger.

I think the biggest lesson to learn from this story is to identify poorly management situations and get out as quick as you can. If an employer does not build trust with their clients they can never built trust with you.

This naturally leads to my own client story. I did not identify a unhealthy client relationship and I endured 10 years of disappointment.

Client Situation #6 - Never saying “no”.

This starts to get really personal. I, Lindsay Marsh, have a story that stretches over 10 years and I want to share it with you today so you can help identify unhealthy client relationships even if they appear to be great on the outside. That is what is so tricky about this story. It all started out so well.

It all started in 2007 when I was first starting out doing freelance work. I was on year 2 of freelancing and was starting to gain a little bit of confidence. I was teaching myself design online so I only could get so far with my training so I was learning as I was doing client work.

I had a person reach out to me interested in getting a logo done for a company in the medical industry. In their mind it was a trial for me. I completed the brand design with flying colors, although there was a lot of back and forth with different concepts. Their client was thrilled and so they continued to offer me other work. They were well known in my town and they were connected with some pretty big local companies some in which were nationally known.

This person acted as a liaison with clients. I would be the person behind the curtain as they acted as a small design agency. They would get all the credit and I would get my small hourly rate.

They eventually started to give me some of the highest profile work I would do at the start of my career. In many cases, I would flip though local magazines to see my design work and find billboards with my designs on it for these clients!

There were creative differences too. They had an older dated style preference I always felt like I was fighting against. They were not too open to my modern style ideas so I learned to develop the style they liked to the detriment of what I thought would be best. I got really good at producing what they would like and found myself doing that instead of pushing the boundaries. In a way, I gave up my creative voice.

There was nothing super sinister going on. They treated me with respect until I would say something was difficult for me. I would move mountains for them and when I ran into a tough situation with time, they would be upset. There was zero respect for my time.

They sent me a project that was due the next morning that I would normally bill for two weeks of work. They knew this too as they worked with me on similar projects. I did not sleep that night and finished the project my mid-morning. This abuse of my time would continue as I was giving work just days after coming home from having a baby at the hospital.

I started wonder if I was in an abusive client situation. Was there gaslighting happening? They were always professional but I always resented them for how they treated me. I felt like they owned me and if they said “jump!” I would say “how high?”. They gave me some great work and in return I had to sell all my available time to them. I would bring my laptop to vacation because of them, as you never know when an “emergency change” would come up.

I will never forget the time I was out of town for a wedding and they had huge changes to a big project we were working on. I ended up in the attic in the vacation house my family was renting because it was the only quiet place. I did not enjoy that wedding at all. I was in a dress getting ready to go when I was in Adobe InDesign making the smallest tedious changes. After that I just felt trapped.

Their income became over 60% of my total freelancing income. Allowing that to happen was mistake Number 1. If I let them go, I felt like I would have to start over.

My hourly pay never really went up that whole time, either (we are talking about 10 years) but the quality and size of the clients would only get bigger.

I think the hardest thing of all of this is parsing out: whose fault was it? Was it mine for not standing up for myself and not saying NO enough? Or was it their fault from taking advantage my lack of self confidence to continue to underpay but also over work me?

As the years rolled on I went from being thankful for the income to being resentful. I would see his name on my e-mail and my skin would crawl. “What now” I would think. It was a unhealthy symbiotic relationship that I was too scared to end.

Fortunately, I started creating online courses. The second income stream allowed me to slowly let go of my freelancing clients, many of which I had for 10 years or longer.

The toxic client is the first one I decided to let go. When I did, it was sweet relief. I did not realize how toxic this was until I started to review my other long term client relationships. The other client relationships were beautiful and I was treated with mutual respect and care. When I told them I was leaving there were tears but also excitement as they knew I was heading off to something really great.

When I let my toxic client go it was more of a “Meh” situation. I was excited to be going but they could care less what would happen to me.

The golden nuggets for this long personal story are as follows:

1.) Say no. It sounds easy enough but you have to set clear boundaries for your time and what you are willing to live with. Be happy with who you work with. You should not settle for anything less.

2.) Develop mutually respected client relationships. Really care for the people you talk to everyday. After years you should really feel like you know them personally.

3.) Do a client audit every year. Ask yourself are you happy in each client relationship? This can be for employers, too. Am I treated with respect? Are they paying me enough for my work? It is easy to let things slide the longer you work for someone.

4.) Never let one client become more than two-thirds of your total freelancing income. This limits how easily it is to let clients go.

5.) Firing clients is normal. Having to let a client go happens and is healthy. Rarely are 100 percent of people great to work with. We quit jobs all the time but we have such a hard time firing a client. We feel like we have failed if we do so, but in fact we are pruning the tree so it can grow more fruitful.

I hope you enjoyed this read through various client situations!

Know that you are not alone in suffering through some unhealthy client situations and know you will write a few stories of your own. Through time you will develop the ability to avoid more of the negative situations and you will find yourself able to write really positive stories about healthier client relationships.

If you enjoyed this please let me know below in the comments and I can write a part 2. I have many more stories to share but wanted to keep this article a bit more brief.

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