[rant]
Don’t you just love it when you come up with a really fresh, innovative, cutting edge approach to a design, spend a few hours working it up and get about halfway through it, only to have the client come back and say, “Oh, that’s not what we want at all. We wanted something far more ‘abstract’.”
First of all, ‘abstract’ is subjective, are we talking Miro-esqe abstract or 1960s color field abstract? Gustave Moreau abstract or Jackson Pollock abstract? More elaboration on that would be nice. What the customer was after here was just vague beams of color, when I’d already added laser beam cannon looking things shooting RGB beams and awesome little circuits embedded in the background over a brushed metal texture and a transparent layer of silicon wafer chips tiled so that the natural gradient in them stood out through the transparency.
I know that, as step-and-fetch-it graphic designers that we’re supposed to match our customers’ artistic visions and give them what they want, it’s just really disheartening when your kickass design gets picked apart by non-designers (everything’s done by a damned committee) much as a roadkilled animal gets picked apart by crows. So, I swallowed my pride and my arguments and neutered my design per my customer’s request, but I’m ■■■■ sure not happy about it. The Customer got what they wanted, and a few others who critiqued it said, “oooh, that’s pretty”, but it’s just salt in the wound when you know in your heart that it’s crap and could do so much better. The moral: Don’t fall in love with your design unless it’s something you’re doing for yourself. 
[/rant]
Thanks for listening, guys.