Someday I need to make a showcase of all the rejected mockups I’ve made for my employer’s clients. My showcase would prob’ly be a thousand times more creative and intriguing than the ugly, counter-intuitive designs that these clients finally approve for their sites.

I don’t blame the clients entirely for their poor knowledge of the internet, the web, and graphic design in general. After all, not everyone knows that green and red only match at Christmas. The problem I have is that the clients are stubborn. They refuse to trust my design skills in a field they truly know nothing about.

Now, this is not true of all the clients. Many of them acknowledge my skills as a designer, problem-solver, and overall internet know-it-all. They say, “You do this every day, so be creative and give me something my customers will like.” Also, a good amount actually do have their own graphic designers or art directors who can give me quality mockups or ideas for their sites.

The stubborn, design-impaired clients are in the majority, however, and on the optimistic side, they are forcing me to provide myself with a massive archive of rejected mockups.

I have designed beautiful, state-of-the-art, easy-to-navigate web sites for many clients who have turned right around and ordered me to remove the navigation, change the colors to ones that clash, turn on all the table borders, and add blinking/scrolling text.

Fortunately I still have copies of those pages (and/or PhotoShop mockups) with understandable navigation, well-chosen web-safe colors, and a complete lack of table borders and other annoying, unattractive HTML elements. Someday they will all be part of a big, random web site of rejected mockups, complete with links to the final sites themselves, so everyone can see what they forced me to do.

Of course, if I want to keep my job, I’ll have to hold off on the links.