I've had a few interesting design requests during the past year. It usually starts with something along these lines, “Could you amend this old pdf that you did for us a last year. It just needs updating with a tiny bit of text? Oh, can you also let me know how much it cost.”

First things first and just to make sure it is only a tiny bit of text, I request the marked up file so that I can have a good look through before committing to a price. As described, the amends are tiny and hardly worth the time to go through the admin and invoice so I write back with the good news that there will be no charge. In difficult times, “every little helps!”

The majority of the time, the file is tweaked, sent back, signed off and job done – everyone is happy. However, there are few of you out there (and you know who you are!), where:

• the ‘tiny bit of text’ has suddenly become a re-write
• the colours no longer match the brand guidelines – when did that happen?
• the image is no longer relevant.

Like the ‘boiling frog’, we often don’t notice the changes creeping up on us… until it’s too late.

Just one more thing…

The changes and amends are notched up ever so slightly that before you can jump out, you find yourself in hot water and that ‘little job’ has taken up the best part of a day’s billable time.

I sometimes feel like I can relate to the poor frog in a Charles Handy’s boiling water story, you know the one, where a frog, placed in cold water that is slowly heated will not sense any danger. The suggestion is that the frog will allow itself to be cooked slowly to death.

Interestingly, according to some biologists, this story is false and a frog in such a situation would simply jump out.

So perhaps it’s only us designers who have this problem!