I've had the problem with several clients that they want to tell me exactly what to do when designing. I'll come up with some concepts, they like one, but then they proceed to directly tell me: change this image, move that to the right, change this color, etc. All of these changes ruin everything they liked about the original design, and of course, it ends up looking very unprofessional.  How do I effectively communicate that that behavior is counterproductive to their product/company? I am here to solve their design problems, and they make me jump through hoops with making the changes they want (and usually when they get them, they say, Oh, that's not working...) Would it be advisable to say something like, "Tell me what problems you have, and leave the design solution to me"?   Some background info: I have made several designs for my client that they have liked, and I feel like they do value my work since they are keeping me busy. However, lately I am starting to feel disrespected by their requests for changes because the changes do not seem to be coming from an actual need, but more because Bob in Sales thinks the logo should be centered. I've tried the normal diplomatic approaches and explaining why things work the way they do (easier to read, target audience likes this look, this way conveys/highlights our core message, etc.), with varying success. I would love to hear your experiences, especially if you have successfully dealt with this situation.  EDIT: Not a dupe, I read the other post. I'll rephrase my question: how have you successfully dealt with stopping a client from art directing? Not, why should I suck it up when the client is art directing?  EDIT 2: The thumbprint client info, while related, is not what my question is. I am interested to know: has anyone successfully stopped a client from art directing? If so, what kind of communication did you specifically use?   The other posts that people think are dupes have answers that relate to A) taking it and dealing with it B) walking away from the client as a last resort. These are not the things I am asking about.  Note: I did see a video of a well-known designer who mentioned he does not allow his clients to art direct and had to stop a client from doing so (he did not elaborate).
I am pretty sure that most of us here, or at least those do graphic design for living, have found themselves in following situation:   You agree with a client to do the design, agree on price, schedules, formats etc… You work hard, make adjustments, collaborate with client; everything goes well in the beginning. At some point you realise that the client does not listen your professional advice regarding design and prefers his/her own ideas that might not look so professional (choice of fonts, colors, odd choices of elements, shapes etc…). No matter how hard you try, the client is persistent and will not accept the designer’s advice. You get back to work, try to make the best out of it, and the final result is not so good, mainly because you had to stick to the client’s wishes. Work is shipped, payment done, and you don’t want to include this work in your portfolio because it is not good. After all, it is not your work, it is something that was physically created by you as a designer, but the ideas, concept, story, and message came out as a result of nonprofessional person, your client.   Ok, they pay for it, and as long as they are happy this is fine. But, the more compromises you make, the more time you spend working on bad design. If you are a young designer on a quest to get recognition, you don’t want to work just for the sake of money and then face the lack of good design in your portfolio.   Maybe at the beginning of your career you don’t care that much, but later if life this might be a big issue. At some point you will be approached by a big client that might offer you long-term contract, but first they will want to see your work. No point explaining to them what you did and why you made so many compromises.   They will not be interested in that.  Every project is precious as your time and you want to do use it wisely and produce great work.   How would you deal with such a situation?
Groups in derived series are normal in the whole group I am considering a finitely generated, solvable group $G$ which has subexponential growth. Let $G=G_0\vartriangleright G_1\vartriangleright....\vartriangleright G_d\vartriangleright G_{d+1}=1$ denote the derived series of G.  It should be the case that $G_d$ is normal in $G$. Does anyone know why this is true? I don't know whether all of the assumptions above are necessary for the result. In our application, we receive text files (.txt, .csv, etc.) from diverse sources. When reading, these files sometimes contain garbage, because the files where created in a different/unknown codepage.  Is there a way to (automatically) detect the codepage of a text file?   The detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks, on the StreamReader constructor, works for UTF8  and other unicode marked files, but I'm looking for a way to detect code pages, like ibm850, windows1252.     Thanks for your answers, this is what I've done.  The files we receive are from end-users, they do not have a clue about codepages. The receivers are also end-users, by now this is what they know about codepages: Codepages exist, and are annoying.  Solution:    Open the received file in Notepad, look at a garbled piece of text. If somebody is called François or something, with your human intelligence you can guess this. I've created a small app that the user can use to open the file with, and enter a text that user knows it will appear in the file, when the correct codepage is used.  Loop through all codepages, and display the ones that give a solution with the user provided text.  If more as one codepage pops up, ask the user to specify more text. 17.10 Software installed in software center, but not accessible In Ubuntu 17.10 I installed applications from the software center. At first everything worked fine, but after a few days they kind of disappeared. They are neither found when searching in the dash, nor when the executable name directly in the terminal. However, the software center shows them still as installed and they can be launched from there. Any help to fix this strange behavior is appreciated. GParted won't let me edit a partition How to pick one number from each sorted list so that the difference between the minimum and maximum is as small as possible? Get lists of dependent picklist options in Apex I've upgraded from 12.04 to 14.04 via command-line when my system froze, had to do REISUB and dpkg --configure -a to recover from crash after rebooting.  Now everything seems to work except automatically mounting external thumb drives and external hard disk drives. After plugging in said drives, they fail to show up on the left pane and remains unmounted. I can see the device if I run lsusb and fdisk though, so it's possibly to manually mount it but I'd rather resolve why it's not automatically mounting. Easiest way to sort DOM nodes? If I have a list like this:  &lt;ul id="mylist"&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item1"&gt;text 1&lt;/li&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item2"&gt;text 2&lt;/li&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item3"&gt;text 3&lt;/li&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item4"&gt;text 4&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt;   What's the easiest way to re-arrange the DOM nodes to my preference? (This needs to happen automatically when the page loads, the list-order preference is gained from a cookie)  E.g.  &lt;ul id="mylist"&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item3"&gt;text 3&lt;/li&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item4"&gt;text 4&lt;/li&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item2"&gt;text 2&lt;/li&gt;     &lt;li id="list-item1"&gt;text 1&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Ubuntu 14.04 System Logging Growing a PostGIS geometry by a percentage I am calculating the class group of $\mathbb Q(\sqrt 6)$. My working is as follows:  The Minkowski bound is $\lambda(6)=\sqrt 6&lt;3$ so we only need to look at prime ideals of norm $2$. $2$ divides the discriminant, $24$, of $\mathbb Q(\sqrt 6)$, so $2$ ramifies, and so for any prime ideal $\mathfrak p$ of norm $2$, $\mathfrak p^2$ is principal. But $(2, \sqrt 6)^2=(2)$, so $\mathfrak p=(2, \sqrt 6)$ has norm $2$. If I can show $\mathfrak p$ is not principal, then I can conclude that $Cl(\mathbb Q(\sqrt 6))\cong C_2.$ But if there was an element of $\mathcal O_{\mathbb Q(\sqrt 6)}$ of norm 2, this would correspond to a solution of the diophantine equation $x^2-6y^2=2$. Clearly $x$ is even, so writing $x=2n$ we get $2n^2-3y^2=1$. Now reducing modulo $3$, we get $2n^2\equiv 1 \pmod 3$ which has no soultions. Hence $\mathfrak p$ is not principal and $Cl (\mathbb Q(\sqrt 6)) \cong C_2.$  However,  says that the class group is trivial. Where have I gone wrong? What am I misunderstanding? Is $(2, \sqrt 6)$ principal? What happens if I combine Ur-priest and prestige class to exceed 10 effective spellcasting levels? Suppose I have a human character who invested 5 levels on Wizard, 2 on Ur-priest(by appropriate feat chain), and 8 levels of Mystic Theurge, net level of 15. This allows you to cast spells as stated in 10th level Ur-priest Spells per day table. Now, assume that I leveled up, and I choose Mystic Theurge as the next level class. This makes me to look up Ur-priest table for Level 11, which does not exist. In this case, what happens to my divine spells per day? Does it continue to progress "in the same pattern", as Hellfire Blast progresses with Hellfire Warlock-Legacy Champion build? Does it stop and I only get Wizard spells per day? Or, isn't it allowed to do so?  I am totally aware that although the answer is "yes", it does not mean it means spells over 9th level will be granted to my character unless I take Improved Spell Capacity, which requires me to be epic. What I am curious is the progression of spells per day of existing spells.  P. S. Don't ask me how to satisfy the requirements. This is possible by combining Apprentice (Criminal), Iron Will and Great Fortitude as level-up feat, and Spell Focus (evil) as a Wizard bonus feat (RAW, it is a "Spell Focus" feat, anyway.) One of the topics that seems to come up regularly on mailing lists and online discussions is the merits (or lack thereof) of doing a Computer Science Degree. An argument that seems to come up time and again for the negative party is that they have been coding for some number of years and they have never used recursion.  So the question is:   What is recursion? When would I use recursion? Why don't people use recursion? What is the proper way to change the DNS IP? Do paths in Adobe Photoshop have to be closed? I am working to convert a png to a vector graphic.  I am outlining the image using the pen tool.  Photoshop insists that the pen tool produce closed loops in order for me to use the "Stroke path..." tool.  Why is this? What's the difference between absolute path &amp; relative path when using any web server or Tomcat? How to get autofocus to work with D5100 and AF-P DX Nikkor I just bought Nikon 18 - 55 mm f/3.5 - 5.6G VR AF-P DX Nikkor from .  When I connected it to my Nikon D5100, the autofocus didn't work. There was nothing about this from the original seller's website.  Is there anything I can do short of returning? General relativity (gravitation) in time and one spatial dimension I don't have any idea of general relativity but intend to learn. Is it a good idea to study general relativity in two dimensions (time and single spatial dimension) in the begining to get good idea on the subject? If it is, then please give some references for such a treatment. We've got a Windows 10 installation running in an environment where it can occasionally lose power and restart. However, this sometimes leads to corruption of files.  I've had a look at Windows "To-Go" but this seems to be persistent. And I've also checked out virtualisation, but that would require us to run a non-persistent Windows 10, in another Windows 10 environment.  Is it possible to install Windows 10 as a "non-persistent live CD"? So that a user will have a seemingly fresh Windows 10, but doesn't require to re-install it at each startup? Selecting attribute values with html Agility Pack I'm trying to retrieve a specific image from a html document, using html agility pack and this xpath:  //div[@id='topslot']/a/img/@src   As far as I can see, it finds the src-attribute, but it returns the img-tag. Why is that?  I would expect the InnerHtml/InnerText or something to be set, but both are empty strings. OuterHtml is set to the complete img-tag.  Are there any documentation for Html Agility Pack?