Any graphic designers or other folks who do work for friends and family? I need help! [View All]

[grace0418]

Okay, I have a situation and I'm looking for some input from you all. I've been helping my actor/director/musician brother whenever he needs a cd cover or poster or whatever for years. He's my brother and I'm happy to do it. He never has much money, but he's always a very easy client and pays me back in other ways so that's not an issue.

He's collaborating with a woman in another state on a new play and has commissioned me to design the poster and cd cover. They are paying a small sum of money but I would've done it pro bono for him. The problem is that he doesn't trust his own design sense (which makes him a very easy client when he and I are working one on one), so his writing partner has taken on the roll of decision-maker for the show's aesthetic. And, quite frankly, she's a pain in the ass. She knows just enough to throw out some design buzzwords but not enough to actually understand what any of it means. The poster has been through 8+ permutations, all of which my brother liked just fine. His partner, however, keeps wanting to frankenstein completely disparate elements of the different versions together into some kind of crappy, lunatic, multi-fonted design collage. Which, at this point, I wouldn't even care about any more if she would only PICK ONE. I told her, nicely, when I sent her versions 7 & 8 that I needed to move onto other projects so I hoped that one of these might work for her. Now I hear that "she has a few more suggestions" for me that she will be emailing me sometime soon. My brother knows how I feel and seems to sympathize but is still letting her call the shots.

So, do I:

a. tell her I won't be making any more changes and she'll have to pick between versions 1-8 or find another designer

b. tell her that I will make version 9 but that's it

c. keep making changes because he's my brother and I don't want to screw him over

d. make my brother deal with it

e. suggest that maybe my design style is not what she has in mind and that she shouldn't feel obligated to retain my services just because I'm her partner's sister

f. some other option I hadn't considered

Thanks for any and all suggestions.