Page 36 of Hard to Forgive

He nodded and began to flip through the book. When he got to the first one, he began to rip the page from the book. He tore it out carefully and proceeded to do the rest with the other drawings. I wanted to peek at the pages in between, but I didn’t want to risk getting punched.

I’d seen that clenched fist, and my face was too pretty to meet it, so I averted my gaze until the notebook was safely stored back in his bag. Then I studied the images again. They were all very intuitive, but they still looked different enough from every other dating app out there.

“What is this label?” I asked, pointing to one of the interfaces.

“A genre tag,” he answered immediately. I raised a questioning brow. “Users can input their favorite genre of music or book or movie, or just one that relates to them, and it shows with their pictures. So if a user is really into horror movie and they see another one labeled Horror, then it could be a better match than someone labeled Romantic Comedy.”

“Or it could end up with them on the eleven o’clock news if horror is just how the person describes themselves.”

He grimaced, left fist tightening into a ball and releasing after just a moment. “I hadn’t thought about that,” he admitted.

“I like the idea of putting some kind of label there for a quick glance, but I’m not sure if genre is a good one.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe zodiac?”

“Every app has zodiac. If we want to stand out…”

He trailed off, but I understood what he meant. The client wanted this app to be different than everything else on the market. “We can come back to it.”

I expected Jonas to argue, but he didn’t. “I like parts of all of these. Which one was your final submission.”

“None of these.”

I looked over the careful drawings and then back at the man who had made them. “None of these?”

“Nope. These were the base ideas, but the final one I did on my computer.”

“Can I see that one?”

“Show me yours first.”

I rolled my eyes, but did as he requested. I pulled up my proposal, suddenly feeling less secure about it. Because mine hadn’t had nearly the amount of thought that his did. In fact, it looked really basic now that I was looking at it again after seeing the artistry that Jonas had offered.

He cocked his head to the side as he studied it. “I like the colors,” he finally stated after a minute of silence. “I also like the font, but it doesn’t look anything like the logo the client provided.”

“It’s a placeholder.”

“It’s incongruous to the rest of the design. The other fonts you chose look great with that, but would it look great with the actual logo?”

I sighed. Who would have guessed that Jonas Koetter would be a control freak about something like this? But then, who would have known that he had secret artistic talents hiding under the brooding facade. It went to show that I knew next to nothing about him, other than the way he tasted and the sounds he made when he came.

“Okay, so what kind of font would you do?”

He shrugged. “That’s a fine detail. We need to figure out the basic building blocks before we fine tune them.”

A non-answer if ever I heard one.

“You’ve seen mine. Show me yours,” I opted to say instead of starting a fight with him.

He did, and of course, it was as artistically rendered as his drawings. I was suddenly seeing why he was on the UI team. For the first time, I was doubting why I was on it though. I didn’t have nearly the talent he did at it.

“I like that one. It combines elements of a lot of these,” I observed, waving over the drawings.

“Yes, but it’s still not the final product. Now that we’ve seen what we each brought to the table, don’t you think maybe we should start actually designing based on what the client wants?”

He had a point. I nodded and opened a new document.

“Let’s get to work.”

13

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