[IgorPartola]

My favorite was this nice redesign I did where the form fields had no labels. Instead the designer cleverly used placeholders on input elements to identify them. Moreover they had a great deal of customization for each form to make them look nice and compact. At first glance this looked fantastic, until you try to add an error message to it.

I pointed this out to them, and their first inclination was to highlight the border of the errored out elements in red. Great, except for the large minority of users who are color blind. Also, this doesn't indicate what the error is, just that there is one. On top of that, form-wide (vs field-specific) errors still don't have a place.

This drives me crazy, because it's not like I can logically extend their design and say "let's put the errors here. What do you think?" Their design was so tight (in a good way I suppose) that it left no room for this kind of thing.

My suggestion is to make your version so ugly that it cannot be overlooked. Put the errors in size 72 font in neon green right over the fields. No way for it to go into production that way.

[Quarrelsome]

you're describing my exact scenario here.