Do we appreciate honesty?

I recently have been working with a company who had like really clear goals and ideas on how to solve their business problems. They took me through a long presentation and then showed me the designs that their designer had made. And I was really surprised with how poor a design job had been made. It was clear to me that the designer didn’t have much experience in UX and most of the design elements were very basic elements as taken from the Twitter Bootstrap Framework.

My initial question was like: “Do you want me to work on that? Maybe make some slight adjustments or something?”, but the director told me they were quite satisfied with the result and just needed me to implement the branding and then build it. I looked at the designs briefly and began to point out some obvious mistakes in the design, potential problems that could occur by doing things this way and how little resemblance the design had to the brand and that it wouldn’t support the brand in any way.

Apparently, this wasn’t to the director’s liking. I am sure their “in-house” designer must have been his wife’s nephew or something, cause he really protected the work of the designer instead of listening to the critique given. It really made me wonder why they at all hired me in the beginning then. There are plenty of designers and developers out there who could have helped them for almost no money. Why do you hire me if you don’t want to hear my opinion? It is what you pay me for.