pantagruel

Why I'm sometimes stabby after a day at work

2009-12-10T15:39:13-08:00

Some of you might wonder why I'm sometimes stabby after a day at work. After all, how hard can it be, making pretty trash, wrangling designers, and drinking coffee?

O my children, you do not know the true horrors. But this cartoon from The Oatmeal, "How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell," has done the explaining for me.

It continues, here.

Now, consider that at any given time, I manage ~50-100 projects. Now, of course, most of my clients are lovely people who do not do this. Of course. And naturally, making changes comes with the territory. It's just part of the gig. But there's always a couple of clients who are just like this cartoon, and they can ruin my entire week's workload in a 30-second phone call.

This, kids, is why god invented gin & tonic. Which I intend to have as soon as I get home in a few hours.

art direction, design, one really riled AD, ow, things I wish I'd written, work, yikes

When designers snap

2009-12-01T15:39:37-08:00

It's an ugly thing when a designer snaps and has finally had enough of a Very Bad Client. But oh, it's hilarious. Courtesy of Colleen Doran, this email thread, its pie charts, and logo, had me laughing until I cried. Oh, how I've so wanted to send emails like that, with these charts:

David Thorne, you're my new design god.

art, design, designing, riposte, things I wish I'd written, work, bad client

lowballing

2009-11-17T13:41:26-08:00

I've written before about the plague of lowballing that infected the design industry for a few years. Sites like eLance and Guru.com seemed like a great way for designers and clients to find each other, but that promise never materialized. Instead, it became a seething pool of 'designers' who would use stock images and templates and call it original work. It wasn't at all uncommon to see clients demanding work on spec, websites for $30, and other horrors.

This used to cause me a huge amount of consternation. I'd spend hours scouring these sites for reasonable work for reasonable clients, and come away with nothing. Many clients would insist that they could pay their nephew $100 for projects that were roughly 40 hours' worth of work. Those people, I avoided like they had swine flu; it's not worth it to try to convince them that design is a worthwhile investment. On the other hand, some of the clients were genuinely decent people who simply had no idea what design cost, or what a realistic hourly rate was. With them, I could have a conversation about why good design was important; what design could do for their business; and what they should be looking for in a designer, even if they didn't hire me. Then there were the very, very rare clients that knew the value of design and didn't blink when I gave them my bids. Alas, I saw maybe two of those a year; but one of them has been a longstanding client of six years.

Lowballing isn't just simply having the lowest bid on a project, which is an important distinction. It's bidding so low, that it's entire orders of magnitude removed from the other bids. Here's an example: I'm an art director. I often send specs out to printers for their bids. I've been doing this long enough to have a reasonable idea of roughly how much a print job should cost, and I'm well aware of the service triangle (good, fast, cheap; pick two). So if I send out specs for a job that should cost $5000 to three printers, and I get bids back for $5200, $4800, and $600 -- I don't get ecstatic about the $600 bid. Instead, I wonder if they misread the job specs and are thinking I want something simply photocopied. (Oh, it's happened.) If they didn't misread the specs, and are instead claiming they're going to be able to print my $5000 job for $600, they're lowballing.

"Lowballing isn’t about competition; it’s about desperation and fear," Leslie Burns-Dell Acqua wrote in her article, "New Challenges from the Lowballers...and What to Do." And that's completely true. It's not about true competition, or providing a better quality of service for less money. It's more often than not providing substandard service for substandard pay, and hoping to make up the difference in sheer volume.

Luckily, things have now changed. Enough firms have been burned badly by the lowballing designers -- who tend to cut corners, do slipshod work, and often don't support their work once the project's over -- that they're beginning to understand that you really do get what you pay for.

advice, arg, design, designing, work, yikes

fiction generator and ten dimensions

2009-11-16T07:30:09-08:00

Oh, if only it were this easy:

In other news:

It's a typical fall at Saltmine U. Late summer through fall is the busiest season in academia, as it's often the beginning of the fiscal and academic years. Budgets must be either used up, or freshly funded. So it's busy, and the furloughs aren't making life any easier, as people are now gone more days, but still must produce the same amount of work. I will be very relieved when the winter break comes in December, and I can fall down and sleep for two weeks.

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John Howe has a great post about understanding the history behind what you're illustrating.

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Dragon Age: Origins took over all my free time for a few days. I suspect that I will never outgrow my love of video games, especially role-playing ones with good stories and characters. Here's a review of the game which contains a mention of narratology -- it's good to see other English majors writing reviews these days, and makes for a nice change from the standard review of 'Best game of the year!!!11!!'

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For those of you who have always wondered what the ten dimensions look like, here's an illustrated explanation:

Imagining The 10 Dimensions - Watch more Funny Videos

And now, on to the week's work.

design, books, gamer, geek, writer, writing, physics

nerd-in-chief

2009-11-02T11:11:35-08:00

How did I miss this spectacular display of geekery in September from the POTUS?

Photo: Getty Images

That Obama decided he wanted to fence against Olympic fencer Tim Morehouse would've been enough to endear him to me -- because I love the sport. But that he did it with a toy lightsaber cements his place in my heart as a fellow member of the Geek Tribe.

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In other news, the annual fall busy season at Saltmine U. continues apace. Things should ease up around Thanksgiving, which will give me a chance to breathe. (Which I'm not doing particularly well at today -- turns out that if you mess up the proportions of yew and wormwood in incense, it aggravates your lungs something fierce. Go me.)

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This weekend, almost all my media devices went on strike. Xbox 360 gave me the Red Ring of Death; my DVD player has decided to suddenly stop playing back discs; and my old iPod will not mount, play back music, or turn on. I suspect some strange electronic conspiracy. I'm hoping a new AV cable for the Xbox will fix the problem, but we'll see.

Maybe our Nerd-in-Chief will hold Microsoft down and force them to make hardware that isn't a bunch of junk.

I can hope, right?

fencing, gamer, politics, work