What's the harm in beating a dead horse?

I said that I would be there at one; I showed up at eleven forty five. The owner walked in at one and asked me what I was doing there. She thought I had said my usual three o'clock.

I got there early because I wanted to finally change offices. I was supposed to do it by the New Year but things happen or rather things don't happen; mostly because I'm lazy.

Her cousin coaches junior hockey and was having a fund raiser to take his team to the nationals. He held a length of poster board with writing caused by a red sharpie around a picture cut and pasted off of some internet site. I know this because I was called down from my office to see it.

"Can we do a poster for Robert?" I looked at what he brought as she held it up. "He was just going to go to Kinko's...and it is a visual world."

"Yeah, it's a visual world even though we're going to cram too much information onto a sign."

"I knew you were going to say that."

"We can't do it that size but eleven by seventeen."

Her cousin said that the ledger size would be fine; I took his poster upstairs. It was the first thing I would produce in the new office.

About an hour later I printed out a poster. I tweaked it three times before I let it go. I showed it to the owner. "You're in the wrong business," she said as I just kept quiet. She then mentioned that she knew some designer that was going to strike out on her own and that she would like people like me. "I have a hard time giving the client what they want sometimes," I said, giving another indication I wasn't happy with the direction she was taking with the latest sign we were working on.

She called her cousin. He came by and asked for fifty copies and while those where printing he asked for twenty five more.

I thought it was cool that we could print seventy five kick ass posters from start to finish in under an hour an forty five minutes without any prior notice but I played it off like I do that type of stuff all day long.

We then focused back on the sign which was our priority for that day. I crammed it full of all the information that she said was desired. For what it was, it looked okay, it looked like another sign that you might see at a construction site if people weren't in the habit of ignoring such type of a sign. She took my first version and the second version to the main floor to show an agent.

"This one's very dramatic and is all about graphic effect but this one has all the information on it."

"Yes, that true but no one is going to pull over and write that information down. I know getting the company name out is important but this sign is going to produce more hits than that one."

"You're right," the agent said in agreement with me.

I would rather have fifty percent of a hundred people see the company name than one hundred percent of ten people. I would rather have folks drop by the easy to remember wed site address and see our company brand than to have a bunch of folks just ignore it from the get go as they drive by some too busy sign.

I ended up tweaking my original sign which will be augmented with a flag banner with our real estate company info, the bank's info that is financing the project, and the project's logo.