I have kill fees worked into my contract. I haven't had to use any (yet) and hopefully never will.

Occasionally, I'll do some agency work, in which case my contract is superseded by a larger entity's. This is totally fine, and makes sense — they have more resources, they have more money, they have more intense contracts. I always look to see if there's a kill fee, and (so far) there always is.

It wasn't officially killed, but I had my first "whoopsie daisy" moment a few weeks ago.

I was hired by a local agency, whom I've worked with before, for a quick-turn assignment. The timing was tight, but the pay was good. They needed an extra set of hands that could pick up some slack and, for the amount they were offering, I was happy to help.

The agency had just completed a rebrand (I think it was approved the day before I was onboarded) and there weren't any formal brand guidelines for me to look at. With only a couple email templates and some WIP slides, I got to work wrapping up some deliverables: an updated Google Slide deck (~30 slides) and a onesheet PDF that reflected the new branding.

Before I keep going, lemme remind you: I did not go to art school.

<aside> 🎓 That's not an excuse, but some good context for this story. I only open up certain tools (cough InDesign ****cough) when I have to. I'm getting better all the time, and make it a point to practice in areas that still feel new to me — typography, color theory, layout, etc — whenever there's an opportunity. I feel like I can do anything because nobody's ever told me otherwise; however, I'm not great at everything because nobody's told me otherwise.

</aside>

The bulk of the work was prepping a Google Slide deck, something I had become quite good at in my short stint at a larger, rival ad agency in Kansas City. I was waiting on some assets so that got put on the back burner.

I (incorrectly) assumed the more immediate need was the onesheet. There weren't any existing WIPs and I figured it would be easy enough to port over some of the stylings from the email templates. Plus it was an excuse to work in InDesign. I'd summarize the client offerings with their new fonts, colors and brand elements, then move over to the presentation deck while this was being reviewed the next day. The plan made sense. I was off and running...

...into a brick wall.

After a good ~3 hours on the PDF, I was having some issues. A lot of the styles I found in their email templates and asset library weren't translating well to the onesheet. There were some font size discrepancies and I wasn't sure exactly how to use the brand colors. Did we care if text appeared in multiple colors? Did the client expect us to use some of their new icons, or were those for specific uses only? This is a lot — do we really have to use all the client's copy? Pretty easy things to navigate, especially since I was providing 3 options. It wasn't perfect, but I took my best swing at applying some of the updated branding.

I spent another hour or so wrapping up things and hit send. I'd been grabbing their styles from Photoshop, rebuilding them in InDesign and laying everything out at a pretty good pace (for me). I sent over my first round of designs, along with some general observations (and questions about the guidelines) before calling it a day.

We were scheduled for a review at some point the following afternoon, but early in the morning, our meeting got moved and several attendees dropped out. That's when I knew things weren't totally right.

I joined the Creative Director one-on-one to get feedback (or so I thought). She opened with, "So, this might be an awkward meeting."

Okay things are definitely weird.

She continued, "Tell me if I'm wrong: you haven't had much layout experience before, have you?"

Gulp. "No. I haven't," I replied.

She proceeded to explain to me that it was clear they made a mistake bringing in a designer for this. If they had taken the time to evaluate the workload, time it took to onboard me, field questions and provide feedback, it would have been a much more efficient project to handle in-house. Some of their team would have to work through the weekend, but the could have saved time and money. It was in the best interest of the company to pay me for my work to this point and let me go.

Was I just fired from a job?

I was surprised for about half a second. Then I realized I was mostly relieved.