Okay, second to working with troublesome clients, what's the biggest thing designers and design firms hate? That's exactly right: RFPs. Well, following up a string of new pieces from the other day, the fellas at Ideas on Ideas have a new read up: "RFP, R.I.P" which is all about how terrible the whole system is, from wasting the time and energies of both parties, designers and the people hiring them, to being just plain impossible to put together in any sort of coherent, meaningful manner. Fortunately, because RFP-hating is sort of old hat in the industry, the Ideas guys seek to come up with some solutions to avoid them or stop sending them out. Chief among their ideas: find people's work you like and just talk to them! Imagine that! They also provide a nice form letter to use to tell RFP senders off, without being a total jerk and maybe still winning the potential client over.

Hi (INSERT CLIENT NAME),

Thanks for the email and interest in (INSERT STUDIO NAME). We'd love to help you with your upcoming project; unfortunately, we don’t respond to open RFPs any longer.

In the past we've found responses to RFPs to be very time consuming, which is difficult given the demand we've had for our work in recent years. Committing time to respond thoughtfully to all of the criteria set forth in these documents is simply not a good use of our resources.

Then again, you could just can them all and try being your own client for a change.