Murdered by gradients

I draw a lot. Mostly on paper with pencils and inks. If you see someone on train with a pen and notebook, that's probably me. But I don't draw for work. The things I do at work usually involves stock photography, typography and some simple vectors here and there. These things pay the bills.

I've been bitching about not having the opportunity to do illustrations for a while but I've since came to regret it. My recent job required me to design a character for a logo. My eyes brightened up when I read the brief. I even read it twice and usually I don't until meeting time, which is a bad habit. Rather enthusiastic about my work for the first time, I whipped out my pencils and doodled away. Minutes later, I went to check what my other colleagues were designing.

Logo name. That's all they did. Fancy fonts and all that. Fine, maybe they hadn't started drawing yet. Minutes later, they were still designing the bloody name, in different colours now! Turned out that they don't draw. Not sure if they could but they didn't. Even when my art director "forced" them to draw something, it wasn't close to what the brief asked for. Then with a flick of his magic wand, I became the designated team leader of the project.

Which was great in most cases but when your head creative director is a jerk whose blindly in love with bright contrasting gradients, this meant disaster. Over the days, I tried to argue my case on why his ideas and so-called style won't work with my drawings and over the days, I gave up as I witnessed my designs butchered and murdered with multi-coloured shiny glows.

There was one day when I sent him some refinements of the logos without any gradients or glows. He was overseas then and couldn't oversee what we were doing during the day. He then responded via e-mail, "Where are my gradients?!"

I screamed.

Yeah I'm that protective of my stuff. Super-overprotective. Grudgingly, I did all the changes he wanted. He's the boss after all. But I'm not happy. Right now, I'm planning how to wrap his office and furniture with psychedelic rainbow wallpaper and wait for his screams.