RANT

We're working on our 600+-page catalog. As we attempt to move more toward a web-based sales entity, the catalog has, appropriately, been shrinking. (Have a mentioned we're a technology company, one of the largest in the world? And I still do my timesheets on paper??)

Anywho, as a result of shrinking the catalog, product presentations have been slashed and burned, and nowhere moreso in the product line I inherited from JD. We'll call it the ABC product line. Products have been combined mercilessly; there is one presentation where we are shoe-horning six pages into two.

The designer I am partnered with for the ABC section, the Quiet Guy, has been doing an awesome job. We have done as much as we possibly can to make these product presentations lean and mean. We are using icons; editing text to the minimum; deleting redundant text or tech specs; shrinking pictures.

Most of the team has worked very, very hard on this. It has been confusing, frustrating, and time-consuming. But we have done a hell of a job.

The pages went down the hall for review (to clarify: "down the hall" means "to the product managers/marketing department"; down the hall is supposed to review the pages for typos, accuracy, cross-sells, etc.). The pages finally started coming back on Friday.

And they are a fucking mess.

The lead product manager -- we'll refer to him as Italian Stallion, or IS -- on the ABC line is an idiot. Even Quiet Guy says so. IS has decided that he wants all the pages to be consistent. Which means he wants a "what's included" box (WIB) on each product presentation.

I pretty much hit the roof on Friday when I saw these pages. I knew they were going to be bad because of how much we had to cut and squeeze and edit and so on. I knew there would be mistakes and oversights. But I didn't imagine we would have to find another two inches of space on every presentation to fit in a fucking WIB. Plus an additional bullet point or two. And tech specs.

Quiet Guy went to bat. He looked at all the pages and decided where we absolutely could not fit those boxes. He went to the lead designer and Our Boss, and drew his lines. He said he would do the best he could on the rest of the pages, but these pages and presentations could not have WIBs. Period.

And we won that battle.

There are still a lot of WIBs to do. I have to track down what is actually included, and put them in the boxes. Again: tedious, time-consuming work.

We are only about one-third of the way through, after two days. More pages will be coming back from review. The pages that we are changing have to go back down the hall.

And in the midst of all this, they want to pull me onto another project, a rebranding for one of our partner businesses. This is especially frustrating because the marketing director, Egghead, is "giving us direction" on the rebranding. This means that Egghead, who is a bigger idiot than IS -- possibly he is the biggest idiot down the hall -- has decided how we are going to design and write the rebranding materials. Even though Egghead is not a writer or a designer (and believe me, it shows). This means that I will spend time writing wonderful, engaging copy, and the Young Guy will do a really cool design, and Egghead will look at everything and change it back to his original crap. Talk about a waste of time! AND it will suck.