Artist's Revenge

All the years I worked at Godfrey Advertising in Lancaster I saw how frustrated artists would get when their clear, coherent designs came back from clients. Sometimes modified, sometimes all but ruined, almost always worse. Because it takes good taste to evaluate art, but clients usually just had money.

We must wear either ACU fatigues or PT uniforms. The one caveat is that we are allowed to wear a unit PT shirt. So one of the three members of our unit with artistic ability volunteered to design the t-shirt. He clearly drew the short straw. A woman in my squad designed the coin that our commander and first sergeant present for people who go beyond the norm. She was designing just for the command staff. The t-shirt will be worn by everyone. So when the design was complete, not just a pencil concept, the artist began to get lots of advice from people who outranked him.

The t-shirt falls under my control to some extent because I am the Morale, Welfare and Recreation NCO. So for $800 I got to do something I never could do at an ad agency. I told the specialist who was getting buried with advice that I would front the money for the first order and to go ahead with the design as is. We are only getting enough t-shirts for half the company with the initial order, so I am sure I will get my money back--hopefully in time to pay the credit card bill. But if not, I still got to move the process along and leave the artwork the way it was designed rather than let a committee change it. In three weeks or so we will be stylish at PT.