It’s Good but It’s Not?

I have been working for this company in the United States as an offshore design resource, more or less, for 6 months now. My job is to design and create e-mail promo and survey promo landing pages and other graphics for their clients with the occassional HTML and website jobs. In that 6 months period, my contacts will tell me that the designs I make are good but they will also talk to me from time to time informing that my designs are not up to par with their standards. Now this is a little bit confusing for me because how can they be good if they’re not up to par with their standards, right? O_o

I was removed from designing e-mail promo pages but was transferred to designing survey promo pages. A template was provided for me to use and I was instructed to just base my designs on the template’s design, which I did. At first, everything was running smoothly and I was commended for doing a great job on the designs I make even though all of them looked basically the same with minor variations on the fonts used, gradient styling, color scheme, etc. but they were fine with that simple style.

Recently, I was told that I wasn’t changing much on my designs of survey pages but because they were liking it I assumed that I was doing it the way they want it done. Unfortunately, I wasn’t and I found that out after completing, like, 10 or more survey pages.

In my recent communication with them they’re practically telling me my designs are shit (in a much nicer way) and yet, in my mind, I was just following their previous instructions specially on designing survey pages. As can be seen below, the designs are practically the same with only some variations because that is how I understood the instructions given to me.

Personally, I didn’t like it because I felt that doing everything like that was very restricting but I have to follow instructions.  Maybe, my fault here was I took the instructions to me too literally.

Anyway, I really didn’t appreciate the tone that was used when I chatted with two of them in Yahoo. It was civil and casual but still some negative emotions can be felt on the way they weave their words. Specially with the female one!

I guess, all I can do now is go back to my old way of designing these landing pages and hope they like it this time because I can’t afford to lose this gig right now due to heavy financial obligations but if worse comes to worst then I guess I’ll just have to go back to finding my own projects, as I have done in the past hundreds of times.

By the way, I was also asked if I still want to continue to work with them. The question kinda made me uneasy because it seems that I would be sacked anytime and not to mention that I haven’t received my pay for the month that ended. It’s not like them to delay payment so I’m currently really, really nervous about not getting paid.