Tofu saddens on a variety of levels
Probably the most interesting failure of a project came to a close without my knowing and I’m only saddened by the fact that I won’t get to be part of more elaborate mind fucks or bastardizations of good web design.
Back in August a guy…let’s call him Mr. Tofu, emails me saying he need several sites and can’t find help. The first of these sites was a vegan online magazine/facebook/craigslist/…I think a bicycle courier was in there, maybe an abandoned factory, I don’t remember it all. This thing was going to be a cluster fuck of everything a website could possibly do. A cost was given and a down payment requested. Mr. Tofu paid said down payment and we immediately took a sharp right away from vegan cluster fuck dot com and drove right into some video site he has, where I spent a good chunk of time trying to get a password to the site’s cpanel just to not do anything at all with that site. Now we back up a little and head on back to vegan cluster fuck dot com and I start getting some wireframe together.
But wait! What’s this!? Mr. Tofu is evolving!
It’s close to September and Mr. Tofu is all sorts of excited and bonererd up due to his own brand of vegan food. We’ve to stop working on vegan facebook-asaurus rex and get a completely different vegan site shot out into the world like a premature ejaculate. This time we’re making an online catalog for his vegan food. Or maybe it was a store. Can’t remember but all the guy knew was web sites were amazing and if he had his way he’d have like 40 internets.
As a standard part of any job I take on I have my clients send me links to sites they feel I can use as inspiration for color schemes, style, what not to do, etc. Mr. Tofu sent me a link to the Keebler site, some pictures of cookies, and eventually a CD cover with an over used sun ray background design thing. Inspiration struck and it was clear what must be done. Take that background and make it the site background because it’s unique and no one else is doing it yet…except the guy he stole the idea from…and every website from the dawn of web 2.0 as a design style. But excluding those billions of examples, this shit was unique.
I sent some design ideas and the only one focused on was the home page. I planned out content areas for information you would hope to find on the homepage of an online catalog. Featured products, and about us blurb, a slideshow thing he asked for. The revision to be done was get rid of all of the content, make the logo big as fuck, and put it in the middle of the page. I tried explaining that it’s a horrible idea and the homepage of a site needs content and his answer was what if we put the nav links across the top of the site? Does that solve the problem? Yes Mr. Tofu, yes it does. Sad face.
At that point we hit the start of September which is when I thought this was all to be completed. Fuck that shit I spent the entire month making the logo bigger! Half way into it I actually thought this was some sort of prank. I didn’t think what I was doing was possible. Looks great but the logo needs to be 5% bigger. Center it but not mechanically. Not even visually fuck I’ll let you know when I see it. That pretty much summarizes the nature of my correspondence with Mr. Tofu all through the month of September.
Somewhere in there I remembered I need to be paid for what I do. I called up Mr. Tofu to see if he’d like to throw some more cash my way and he says what do you mean? I gave you a deposit. Well Mr. Tofu, that was for bean curd social carnival magazine dot com, not for vegan hot dogs are a lie dot com. The cluster fuck of web site ideas web site was apparently scrapped but it wasn’t important to let me know that. It’s not like I plan ahead in my schedule when I accept or turn down work. It’s not like I gave a project away because I thought this vegan magazine thing was going to eat up too much of my time in the coming month. If that silly idea was the case I’d probably be quite surly. On a related note, voodoo dolls are easy to make from tofu! Anyway, I did get some more money from him. All was well.
Skip ahead to the end of November. We’re finally done fucking around with the home page. The logo is something like 750px wide. That’s roughly 650px wider than a logo should ever be. The site has pages and content and is ready for product photos and maybe some refinements. NO NO NO FUCKING NO WHAT WERE YOU THINKING TOFU ASPLODE!!1! Two things happen now. Mr. Tofu has a friend who wants to take over working on the video site. Good because I never had any fucking idea at all about what needed to be done there. All I was ever told was it isn’t done yet. All yours new guy! Second thing is the content needs to be changed on the catalog site. All of it. Not sure why. All I know is it HAS to be done and if I need more money to let him know. So I did. I sent a payment request that never got paid, which is fine because I never got any of this new content so work never happened. All I got was three products images from Mr. Tofu’s friend that were “already optimized” by which he meant 1896px X 1416px. Optimized for what, I don’t know. But I had three big ass images. I held onto them awaiting more content and payment but nothing.
Towards the end of December I get an email from the Tofu friend asking for the login info to the host because he needs to add stuff to the site. So this is why I didn’t get any of that new content for the site. Someone else was working on it. Again I was left out of an important conversation and again I turned down a project believing my time would be spent on prior obligations. Fuck you Mr. Tofu. I’m sure you’ve already decided you don’t want to work with me anymore for whatever reason but I’ve decided for myself that I’ll not be wasting my time on your shitty ideas and projects that I’ll never be able to use in my portfolio. I now eat meat with a renewed passion. I shout racial slurs at vegetables and spread lies about tofu and all other similar bean curd products. Yesterday I fucked a bag filled with organically grown fruit paste while eating a ham I carved to look like a little cow. Good luck with your business Mr. Tofu. May your logos be massive and your ideas be devoid of reason.
