Demanding print advertising client ignores graphic designer's suggestions and forbids them from using any color except for blue: 'The end result was one giant flat blue square'

Fresh-faced, entering into the job market for the first time, you're ready to change the world. When you start your first job, you're ready to hit the ground running and quickly try to improve your role. But when you realize that improving the functions of your role simply isn't possible without improving the organization's functioning at large. So, you, instead, start pointing out all the things that are wrong and could be improved in the workplace.

Except, you quickly learn that things being broken and not working efficiently, effectively, or properly is just how things are; people don't want you to fix them—they want you to go along with it, and go around pretending that things are working properly as they do. Especially because you're young, no one wants to listen, and because of your relative lack of experience, everyone just sees your suggestions as talking out of turn, dismissing and begrudgingly ignoring them as they begin to mount.

Because of this bias towards young, inexperienced staff—this prejudice, even—it takes an exceptional, special type of leader to take on board and process what a junior team member is offering. And this can be incredibly valuable to organizations, as it keeps fresh ideas under consideration rather than pushing them to the side in favor of merely maintaining the bare minimum.

You begin to realize that no one's buying the fixes you're trying to make for the organization's greater good. Your intentions are good, but you're becoming increasingly frustrated at the situation. You simply don't have the influence. Your increased contributions get overlooked in favor of fitting the narrative that keeps the status quo.

See, the ability to get people on board and have them accept that there is a problem and that we can work on it together is important. And when you come in, pointing out that the things and the organization that they are a part of are flawed, they will take it to mean that they, too, are flawed. And, well, they might be, but nobody has ever responded well to being told that they and the things they do are wrong; even if they are doing them wrong and you are right, they're not going to love you for it.

via knowyourmeme

Graphic design is my passion.
"Graphic Design is My Passion is an expression often used by visual artists or graphic design firms in self-advertisement." - Know Your Meme

The phrase is often used to sarcastically highlight how clients and managers treat graphic design work as if they, too, are proficient in the skill.
In this way, inany job, it's about managing expectations of both internal parties and external clients. But in graphic design, it's happening every step of the way.
Graphic design is one of those thankless careers where you do it because you love it, but all the while you're being bombarded by expectations from managers who don't have a creative bone in their body and clients who really don't have any idea what they're really asking, both of them assuming they have some knowledge of the work at hand
See, the thing with graphic design is that everyone thinks that they're a graphic designer to some level because they used Photoshop that one time in high school. ("Graphic design is my passion.")
Similar to other professions where everyone has some degree of experience doing the thing every day, writing, for example, people just don't really seem to get what an actual professional level of understanding of the skill entails. Overestimating their own proficiency in it until they're faced with the brutal reality of their own decisions.
That's basically what was happening here with this graphic design client who began prohibiting this graphic designer from working with other colors in their designs for their terrible car ads, until all they were left with was blue.
via Getty Images

A graphic designer gestures with their hands while working on a project with a client. Other material being considered is visible on the tabletop.

_{The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
"You said you wanted an ad with only one color. You got it buddy!"

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