Yes.
No.
Yes… and no.
It depends on what you say. It depends on how you say it.
If you think that the only audience listening to your rants about your client being stupid is other designers, you would be wrong. Here’s a little secret: every single person who reads how you hate this stupid project you’re on is forming an opinion about you. Not about your client, about you.
How you think about people. How you work. How you deal with difficult situations.
Guess what? Every person you meet is a potential influencer of other people. Every person reading your tweets about your idiot client hassles is slowly becoming afraid of working with you.
They don’t want to be one of your idiots. They don’t want their friend who needs some design work done to become one of your idiots. They won’t refer you, they’ll avoid you.
Happy Ponies and Sparkly Rainbows
Sharing success stories is good. It’s hard to lose when you talk about how much fun you had working on those race car graphics. If your client stumbles upon your post, of course they’ll be happy. If fellow designers read it, they’ll see what it can be like to work in your world, what’s possible (and they’ll despise you with extraordinary jealousy, but that’s fun, too).
Of course it’s not all sunshine and marshmallow cereal leprechauns. If you’re constantly in a state of unbridled joy about your work, people will start to question either your sanity or your veracity.
I’ve had some projects that I’ve just flat-out hated working on. I couldn’t wait to be done and I’ve never worked with those clients again. Those weren’t the typical we-have-a-few-challenges-here projects, those were the they-can’t-find-anyone-to-work-with-them-because-they’re-mean-and-nasty-people projects.
Will you ever hear about them? Nope. Not in a public forum, anyway. Maybe if we have drinks sometime…
So that’s not to say you should pretend to be something you’re not. Share your issues and your struggles so people learn and laugh from your experience, it’s awesome. Think about how you come across when you share, because people are paying attention.
If you had a major challenge with a client, don’t just post your grumbles, share what you did to solve the problem. If you didn’t solve it and it was just a hellish situation, I’m going to be blunt and tell you to shut up. if you can’t spin it to the positive side, keep it to yourself.
So should you talk about your clients? The easy answer is that if you have to ask… no.
