College is like a puzzle, and we make the pieces fit.

Or so went one of the pathetic slogans that my officemates tried to invent for my funding brochure. As the marketing coordinator, it is my job to come up with recruitment literature for stduents and parents. Recently, a new topping has been added to the cake: I am to make a "funding brochure" to send to potential donors, such as foundations, rich old ladies, and Bob Saget.

Easier said than done. On the one hand, we are incredibly lucky to have the sponsorship of a successful corporation in Houston. This corporation not only provides us $50,000 a year to run our program, they also provide us free printing and graphic design. On the other hand, the printing takes 600 years and the graphic designer sucks. His idea of a brochure is one which features lots of poorly colored, mismatched clipart combined with glossy fake photos of generic students. Therefore, I have taken up the burden of designing all these brochures myself, even though I have free professional help just waiting to heed my every wish. Surprisingly, I'm fairly talented at graphic design, despite my lack of experience. It takes me ten times longer to design even one page than it would someone who knew what he or she was doing, but when I'm finished, the final product is actually pretty good. Or so I thought until E (formerly pierced co-worker) saw the cover of my funding brochure design.

The cover features a puzzle, some pieces of which are green in various shades, and some of which are pictures of our students. The effect is quite lovely (IMHO), and the idea is that our organization is to fill in the pieces of the incomplete puzzle of the students' futures. When the funders open the brochure, they will see the complete pictures of our students' faces, smiling and happy as they ready themselves for college. I spent hours and hours on just the cover, tweaking and moving things a hundred times until they were just right. I had listend to E drone on and on about all the different grantwriting workshops she had attended, and had sincerely tried to take her rambling advice seriously. She took one look at the cover and immediately started criticizing everything about it, without saying even one kind word about what I had been doing all week. She didn't like the colors--because it was green, it reminded her too much of St. Patrick's Day. Because there was nothing else resembling St. Patrick's Day on the brochure, I can only assume that anything green in the world automatically makes her think of St. Patrick's. After about 20 minutes of pure, uninterrupted criticism and haughty advice from someone who has never made a brochure in her life, I decided to leave work early.

What happened between us is something I'm sure has happened to all of you: we both had a vision in our minds of something yet unmade, and once it was made, we found out that our visions were different. This is something graphic designers have to deal with all day long; inarticluate morons who ramble on about their visions while the designer keeps revising and recoloring in a vain attempt to read the clients' minds. Here's the trouble with me, though--I ain't a graphic designer. I don't have to painstakingly create E's vision (which involves--you guessed it--stupid clip art), because I'm not working for her. I've decided to go into work tomorrow and give her two options: she can a) write the brochure content and leave the design to me, whether she likes the final product or not, or b) try to relay her vision to the graphic designer, who will then send her ugly designs that once again fall tragically short of her vision. The benefit of option a) is that I get to tell her to leave me the fuck alone and do something that I enjoy without her input. The benefit of b) is that I get to watch her go back and forth for weeks with our graphic designer until she bursts into hysterical tears. I can hardly decide which road to take.