I am sure Dawn (of Dawn’s Brain) and Evil Panda (of Dark Designs) can back me up on this:

You are contacted by a potential client (yay!), usually sent to you by word of mouth, and you’re making a shopping list with the money you will make as the client begins to explain their needs. Then it starts going south. You get a bad vibe and you start feeling that if you get involved with this project you might as well pick up your banjo and join the band on the deck as the design takes on icy water.

I just deflected a job that stank of sink. The client sent me a url of a site in development that the wanted my opinion on how to make it “better”. They also offered “suggestions” of what they would like to see. One of the questions they asked was “What program created the code?”

How odd…

I looked at the site and other than some garishly coloured graphics, I could find no fault in the code or the site layout. Whoever created the site knew their stuff: the CSS was like looking into the face of God. It was compliant to all standards and worked extremely well in Opera, Safari, Firefox and IE. The layout was smooth and professional and in the end I really could not see why they wanted to revamp this development site. I basically said to them that the site is done, just change the colours, dump the bright graphics and stop spending your money on redesign after redesign.

I got this back:

…your input was excellent.
In one paragraph you described the problem and
Offered (sic) the only solution possible.

Thank you again

I breathed a huge sigh of relief as there was no “…now can you do it?” attached.

Of course I just spent 2 hours of my freelance life for free but I think I deflected hours of aggro.