Clients - Who'd Have 'Em?

Earlier I expanded on a comment by Paul Rand to suggest that autonomy of the designer to make design decisions is inversely proportional to the design knowledge of the client.

Little did I know that only two days later I would experience this first hand. A web site redesign I undertook for a client, in which I made it accessible and usable, and replaced black and neon backgrounds with purple text for something far more sedate and becoming the client's business was rejected. "That won't do at all" I was told. "We want to put people off looking at the site - we don't want to attract the wrong sort of people."

The site is for a university faculty, and the theory is that people who are put off by purple text on a black background are not the right sort of students they want... Presumably they only want people who live in a time warp? That one of the courses deals with aesthetics, and another with decorative arts is something that will keep me amused for years to come.

At first I protested, and rejected notions that I should use lots of low res badly scanned images as back buttons etc, suggesting that the site had to comply with disability legislation (which it does at the moment), and implying I wouldn't be responsible for designing a site that broke the law (never mind any rules of good design ever written). But this morning I woke up and thought "sod it. Take the money and run." I've duplicated the site folder and will use the "nice" version in my portfolio, and give the "nasty" version to the client as requested. Alread the site looks garish and uninviting, and fails to get even single-A accessibilty status. And I've taken my name off it.

Have I sold out? Should I have resigned the job? I think its a useful lesson in real world design, and I'll make sure I use it to help my students understand that being a designer is not as romantic as maybe people make out.