The problem with dealing with misinformed clients, many of whom do not deal with marketing on a regular basis, is that they are under the impression that anyone can do effective graphic design and that there is no formal training needed. Clients feel they can do just an effective job using Microsoft Paint and Word for a significant reduction in cost.
The Loss of Details
The thing is, most people who think this also do not know about the standards of the industry and are often caught unaware when asked about bleed, slug. trapping, tracking and leading, and while some may hazard a guess regarding Pantones relating to color, they most likely have never seen a Pantone book, let alone the associated cost of owning one (as well as not even mentioning the planning used in such).
It is this disconnection that most people assume they can start with a designer or artist to start designing their work, and as soon as they get to a certain point, they give it off to some other person (typically someone in-house, or the really ambitious clients may take it upon themselves) to complete the contract without paying what they consider the “exorbitant” fees charged by the person designing their work. While most clients feel happy with this situation, this is not how the business model of a designer or illustrator (or any service industry, for that matter) works. Taking this into consideration, this is considered spec work. Spec work is, in its base form, is something that is produced in a rough form with the promise of being paid upon completion, and the artist not getting paid after the completion of the product, or being paid very poorly after the completion of the work.
The Cost of Free and Thrift
That being said, the fees most designers charge are usually in proportion with their overall experience as well as their associated costs. Even though they do not do much (if any) hard labor in assembly, it is still a service, and they still have costs associated with that service such as overhead, rent, utilities, production costs, equipment and other costs related to operations. Additionally, many of these designers had paid (and might still be paying) fees in regards to their training, whether it was through a trade school, academia, or the school of hard knocks.
Why Pay?
While our industry does thrive on healthy competition, bidding sites and spec work weaken us as a whole to such an extend that those who offer bids online are running the risk of devaluation of the service as a whole. While it is understandable that clients use bidding companies for logos and campaign developments to find the cheapest production artist, they fail to see that by doing this, they:
- Usually pay the artist less than what they thought due to bid sites taking a commission, assuming the client actually rewards one of the artists. spec Watch details this quite visibly in terms of what happens of how much a typical contributor earns on average in relation to the number of items submitted.
- The client might not be paying for a domestic job: While this might reduce the cost even further, it does raise ethical issues with dealing with foreign business, which can lead to:
- Language/design barriers and mistakes: There is also the issue that, by paying less, a client is given a sub-standard product or paying for a less experienced artist to come up with the design, or having a deficiency in speaking a native language, making the overall logo…
- Less effective and less-customized to the client’s business: A professional artist, when assembling any artwork for public display, researches the client, develops a rapport with the client, creates dozens (if not hundreds) of drafts and usually picks no more than ten of the drafts, refines them, proofs them and makes sure they cannot be misconstrued, further refines them, and further proofs them, all before presenting them to a client.
- By going to the lowest bidder, the client is driving up the costs of a professional designer by depriving him a customer base. Granted, while this might not merit a specific level of compassion to the client when he realizes a billable hour of a professional artist’s time may be over $25 dollars USD, again they fail to realize the level of expertise they are paying for.
- Most artists that call themselves professionals have years of experience, and quite often certificates or degrees to justify the price they are charging. There is also the matter of paying for hardware and software. For example, a typical professional designer that uses a computer must have a powerful computer and associated equipment (typically graphics tablets, thumb drives and other paraphernalia), a printer to look at preliminary drafts and to spot potential problems with the mass-production printers they send the project off to (assuming they do not handle mass-production themselves), software whose cost totals in the hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars, and the general overhead of operation.
- By going to the lowest bidder that potentially has little or no experience, the client is consequently costing the jobs of those who have made this their chosen field of study. By doing this, the client is driving up the costs of professional designers, or causing them to go out of business, making this gap of inequity even larger. And lastly…
- A professional artist designs around the present and future specifications of the project: For example, if a project calls for a raster-based image, I usually start designing a logo in vector graphics rather than a high resolution raster due to it is easier to convert a vector image to raster than raster to vector. Additionally, most professional printers request vector images unless it is more of a centralized mom-and-pop printer. If the client requests a higher-resolution image for future products, since the logo is already vectorized, it is easy to scale accordingly to their needs. I also look at other aspects too numerous to list here (but will be addressed in a future article). By paying a little bit more, a seasoned artist looks at aspects (no offense implied) an amateur may overlook due to inexperience, short-sightedness, or lack of motivation.
By going the spec route, while a client may get a design for a fraction of the cost, they will be paying for shoddy work that undermines standard work ethics, drives up detrimental competition, and runs the risk of not having a lasting client-vendor relationship.
I hope this helps those future clients in need of an effective design by making a wise choice.
Sincerely,
Richard Palochak
Graphic Designer