#Not_My_Type
Projects I turn down and why. Expensive lessons from discovery calls with 17 stakeholders, redesigns that hide pricing problems, and other red flags.
The founder sent it the night before our first call. “Background reading,” he said. “So we’re not starting from zero.” It was a UX design competitive analysis. Thorough doesn’t cover it. Fourteen competitors mapped across 23 dimensions. Feature matrices with colour-coded cells. Pricing tables. Screenshots of onboarding flows annotated with commentary. A section called “UX…
A client – B2B SaaS, 34 employees, Series A, scaling fast – needed a contractor for a 3-month engagement. Dashboard redesign, onboarding flow, design system foundations. Senior-level work. $8,500/month. They asked me to help evaluate candidates. I look at portfolios, sit in on one call, give a recommendation. Not a formal arrangement – just something…
It was a referral. Good sign, usually. The brief was four pages. Also usually a good sign – someone had put in effort, thought things through, written it all down. Then I got to page two. “Required UX design skills for this engagement:” What followed was fourteen bullet points. User research. Information architecture. Interaction design.…
The submission went in on a Tuesday. Formal prose. Technical subject. Revised three times. The kind of writing that takes longer than it looks. The editor came back Thursday. The ai checker said 100%. Policy required disclosure or rejection. I wrote every word of it… You submit something to a publication. The editor runs it…
The research is done. Six weeks. Twelve user interviews. A 47-slide synthesis deck with themes color-coded in four shades of blue. The researcher presents to the cross-functional team on a Thursday afternoon. Everyone nods. Someone says “this is really valuable.” Someone else says they’d love to dig into the data more when they have time.…
You know how this goes. Three weeks on the portfolio. Rewrote the case study twice. Rebuilt the layout because something felt off at midnight on a Wednesday. Sent it to two designer friends who said it was strong. Found the right contact on LinkedIn, personalized the message, attached the link. Three days later: automated rejection.…
Six months into her first junior role, she kept doing something her manager couldn’t figure out. Every time a PM overruled a design decision, she just… did it. No pushback. No “here’s why that creates a problem.” She’d nod, open Figma, and make the change. Her manager asked her about it once. “Why don’t you…
Six months into her first junior role, she kept doing something her manager couldn’t figure out. Every time a PM overruled a design decision, she just… did it. No pushback. No “here’s why that creates a problem.” She’d nod, open Figma, and make the change. Her manager asked her about it once. “Why don’t you…
A prospect emailed last month. Polite. Clearly done their homework. “I noticed you’re not on Clutch’s top UI UX design agency list for New York. We usually only consider agencies with a strong Clutch presence. Is there a reason you’re not listed?” There is a reason. It costs $8,400 a month. The “Top UI UX…
The wireframes looked perfect. Clean navigation. Clear hierarchy. Logical flow. Three stakeholders approved everything in 45 minutes. “This is exactly what we need.” PM scheduled development to start Monday. Then the designer added real content. Product names weren’t the placeholder “Product Name” shown in wireframes. They were 43 characters with special symbols and line breaks:…
