Why is this Stakeholders Clients meme funny?

Question

Accepted Answer

### Level 1: Measuring With Hands
This is like asking someone how big to make a poster, and they hold up their hands instead of using a ruler. It is funny because the helper needs exact measurements, but the customer gives a vague picture and expects the helper to magically know the right size.

### Level 2: From Gesture to CSS
For a website, **height** and **width** are not just casual descriptions. They affect layout, image cropping, loading performance, and whether text overlaps on smaller screens. The visible chat labels `Altura` and `Largura` point at those two basic dimensions, but the pictures do not provide numbers.

That is why the meme is about **client expectations** and **requirements ambiguity**. A client may know what they want the banner to feel like, but not know how to express it in web terms. A frontend developer has to translate that into CSS rules, image sizes, responsive breakpoints, and sometimes design trade-offs.

For example, "wide banner" might mean a full-width hero on desktop, a cropped image on mobile, or a fixed ad-style rectangle. Those are different implementations. Without clearer requirements, the developer has to guess, then revise when the guess does not match the client's mental picture. The funny part is that the hand gesture is absurd, but the workflow it represents is extremely normal.

### Level 3: Finger-Span Requirements
The setup from the post is: "Me: what size do you want the banner on your website? Client:" The image answers with two chat photos of hand gestures labeled:

> Altura

and:

> Largura

Those Portuguese labels mean height and width, but the real punchline is measurement by vibes. The client is not giving pixels, aspect ratio, breakpoint behavior, content constraints, safe areas, or even a rough screen context. They are giving hand geometry over chat. Every frontend developer has met this requirement format: not wrong enough to reject instantly, not precise enough to implement without becoming a mind reader.

The deep irritation is that **web banners** are rarely a single size anymore. A banner may need to work across desktop, tablet, mobile, retina screens, CMS image crops, localized copy, dark mode, ad slots, lazy loading, and containers that change width depending on navigation state. "Make it about this tall and this wide" sounds simple until the designer asks why the headline wraps, marketing swaps in a longer campaign phrase, and the client views it on a phone from 2018. At that point, the hand gesture has become a production incident with fingers.

This meme sits right in **requirements gathering**, **UX/UI**, and **responsive design** pain. Stakeholders often describe outcomes visually because that is how they experience the product. Developers need constraints because that is how browsers render it. The gap between those two worlds is where ambiguous tickets are born. A good team turns the gesture into an actual specification: minimum and maximum height, aspect ratio, focal point behavior, allowed cropping, breakpoints, and examples of accepted layouts. A tired team implements the gesture, ships it, and waits for the inevitable "can we make it pop more but smaller?" message.

Client-Specified Banner Dimensions