I’m accepting new projects for May; get a quote

Of all the kinds of printing available, split fountain is without a doubt my favourite.

If you’re not familiar with the process… Typically when printing, a single colour only is used in each ink fountain (pictures to follow), and while gradients can be printed using modern process colour printing – the standard mix of cyan, magenta, yellow and black found in your average home/office printer – printing methods like letterpress are typically limited to solid colours as a wooden or metal block stamps a colour into the paper stock, a method which doesn’t allow blending of multiple densities and layers of ink.

By blending inks directly in the fountain, split fountain printing allows for some wonderful effects in letterpress and screen printing which otherwise wouldn’t be achievable, combining blends of colour with the more exotic stocks and debossing effects that aren’t available with standard offset printing.

The best of both worlds. As promised, some pictures of the process…

Two inks being added to the ink fountain. Split fountain printing isn’t limited to two colours either, it can be three, four, or however many you can fit in the fountain.

Ink rollers combining the two colours from the fountain.

The end results. (Plus a second press with black.)

On to some great examples of split fountain:

Rollers and printing plates for two colour split.

Ink preparation on the screen for, you guessed it, screen printing.

Running the squeegee across the screen, blending the ink.

The finished result of screen printing.

A four colour split – green, blue, red and orange inks used.

Split fountain printing can be a little on the expensive side as far as printing costs go, but you can’t argue with the results. It makes for some great looking prints.

Split fountain printing

I recently travelled to the USA and as fate would have it, I was fortunate enough to be in Los Angeles for the annual printers fair at the International Printing Museum.

To quote a few bullet points from the Print Museums website, the printing fair includes the following:

• Letterpress “Swap Meet:” Don’t miss your chance to buy antique letterpress equipment and everything you need for your own print shop. Type-lovers, graphic designers, artists, printers and members of the public are welcome to ogle over hundreds of cases of type and thousands of pounds of equipment and presses.
• General Gallery Tours – experience 500 years of printing history as our knowledgeable docents guide you through our collection. Letterpress demonstrations on various presses will be on-going throughout the day.
• Type casting and Printing demonstrations on the Museum’s collection of presses will be conducted throughout the day.
• “The 40’s Shop” – Travel back in time to experience a 40’s era working print shop. See Windmills, Ludlows, Linotypes, platen presses, proofing presses, a Miehle Vertical and our vast collection of wood and lead type. See slugs cast on our working Linotype operated by Luis Garcia.
• Purchase beautiful letterpress-printed pieces, artist books, gorgeous handmade and commercial paper/envelopes and more from over 50 Vendors.
• A giant Show & Tell wall! Post your prints, posters, design samples, business cards, typography and more.

In no particular order, here are some photos from this years fair.

Hand ink rollers and press. (Above 3 photos.)

Hand lithography on stone and plate. (Above 4 photos.)

Need a Heidelberg windmill? Pick one up here…

$10 for a quality t-shirt, your choice of screen printing for free.

My favourite, split fountain printing. Here I am concentrating furiously on not mucking it up…

Another fan of split fountain printing. Never a moment when this was unoccupied, obviously a favourite for others too.

More information on future fairs can be found on the Printing Museums website. If you get the chance, I highly recommend visiting a future fair.

The Los Angeles Printing Fair

When in the preliminary stages of a graphic design project involving print, people often contact me asking something along the lines of “How much for 1,000 business cards”. While it might seem that many business cards are more or less equal, there are a dozen factors which dramatically affect the cost of printing, and without knowing more about your desired outcome answering the question accurately can be tough.

While it’s a reasonable assumption for clients to make that the cost of putting ink to paper should not vary much, different outcomes can require significantly more labour on behalf of the printer and also need additional equipment to achieve the desired result.

The following information applies to pretty much all printing – letterheads, label designs, packaging, envelopes etc. – for the sake of this article I’ll refer to business cards alone. Printings costs are affected by the following:

Colour – Business cards are not printed 1 at a time. Depending on the project, anywhere from 4 to several dozen cards are printed onto a larger sheet of paper – as shown on the diagram below – before being cropped and sorted into their individual orders.

Because of this, the colours used dictate how a printer must perform the work.

Many cards are printed in CMYK, this is the standard 4 colour ink combination which you probably have in your home/office printer (though some may have 6 or 8). Because colours are combined when printing with this system, multiple orders can be printed on a single sheet, as shown in the diagram below.

In the above example, a printer has 25 jobs set on 1 sheet. To print 1,000 cards for each order, printing plates are created for each colour (used to apply ink to paper), the press has to be set once and 1,000 sheets are printed. This is obviously a very efficient method of printing which keeps costs down.

Not all jobs can be printed in CMYK though, for a few reasons. The first is that some colours are simply not achievable by mixing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black. Colours like vibrant oranges, bright greens, pinks etc. just can’t be made this way. To achieve these, an individual pre-made colour – called a Pantone, PMS or spot colour – has to be used instead.

The other reason is consistency. Because CMYK is a mix, printing the same thing on 2 different printers can have slightly different results. If one colour is running a little heavier or lighter during a print job, it will alter the final colour to some extent. Because PMS colours are pre-made and not mixed during printing, but applied in a single pass, the colour is reproduced exactly each time.
This consistency is especially important for branding where colour plays a key role. Think ‘Coca Cola red’, ‘Barbie pink’, ‘Twitter blue’, ‘Nickelodeon orange’ and so on. Having constant variations in the colours of their promotional materials would be detrimental to the brand.

There are thousands of Pantone colours, so the chances of a printer having 2 jobs at the same time which use the exact same colours (and other elements…) are basically non-existent. Because of this, jobs are printed like so:

In this situation, to print 25 orders of 1,000 ‘standard’ 2 colour business cards, plates are created and 2 ink fountains are filled with the correct colours for the first order, the sheets are printed, then the press must be completely reset for the next order including new plates, cleaning the ink fountains, refilling them and so on… For every order. Obviously this is a lot more labour intensive and the cost of the cards goes up.

Common stock (that’s your paper), colours and divided labour make for cheap printing. The more you vary from this, be it due to the number of colours used, the type of stock, varnish (usually gloss, matte or satin), extras such as die-cuts, spot varnishes, embossing, foil-stamping etc. the more labour and materials are involved in your project.

There are also different printing methods like offset printing (used in the example above), letterpress printing and others. Each have different capabilities, limitations and requirements. What seems like only a little extra on top of a ‘regular’ business card can in fact be nearly the same amount of work as the card itself.

Because of all these factors, a reasonably thorough understanding of what the final product needs to be is required in order for any hope of an accurate quote.

Things to consider when having business cards designed and printed:

As a client, and especially at the beginning of a project, you’re probably not going to know every last detail for your upcoming printed materials, and nor should you be expected to. That’s why you’re working with a graphic designer, after all. There are a few factors to consider though, which will help in getting a more accurate quote.

If you have an existing brand identity, can your corporate colours be printed in CMYK or will they need to be Pantone?
How many colours will there be?
What kind of stock and finish do you want?
Will you want any ‘extras’ like embossing, a spot varnish, or die-cut?

A set of business cards could be anywhere from $200 to $2,000 depending on what’s required. With these questions answered, the processes required to achieve your desired outcome can be narrowed down and a more accurate quote can be given. Image credit.

Answering “how much does printing X cost”

While “book learning” is all well and good, in my opinion nothing beats hands on experience.

While undertaking my studies in graphic design years ago and learning about printing – the printing equipment itself, printing processes and how to prepare print ready artwork for clients – by far the most useful information wasn’t learnt in the classroom, but when volunteering for work experience at a printing house.

How to find the right printer and learn all you can:

Finding local printers should be relatively easy. A Google maps search for “printing house your area” should bring up plenty of results, but before you start emailing everyone within a stone’s throw, you want to make sure you’re contacting the right printers to maximise your experience.

Like in any type of industry, printers vary in size and specialise in different areas. Printers also have more or less modern equipment which use varying printing processes to achieve the same results. On the smaller end of the scale, some may only provide basic offset printing services, and while still interesting, this will limit your learning experience.

You’re not there to learn the basics, right? You want to learn it all!

Stay completely away from the “instant” type printers where they run you off a hundred business cards in 20 minutes for a few bucks. The equipment used here are mostly high end digital printers – basically a ‘big brother’ version of the printer you have at home – and there’s not much to see here.

As you expand into more areas and larger companies, printers will offer offset printing ranging from a 5 colour press (CMYK + either a varnish or additional Pantone spot colour) to 12 colour presses used for complex jobs with multiple additional colours or multiple varnishes.

Some will offer letterpress printing. Compared to traditional offset printing this is a completely different world. You know those vintage wooden blocks of type? You know those 600gsm cotton business cards with the deep impressions you love to see? This is where they come from.

Others may specialise in finishing services. While some printers do handle this work in-house, things like foil-stamping, laminating, mounting, embossing and drilling are often outsourced and not handled internally. My personal favourite, colour edging/edge painting, is one that is often handled by book binders, and not printers themselves, even though they may have edge painted business cards in their portfolios.

Even something you’d expect to be dull like binding a magazine together is a sight to see. A lot happens with those pages and spools of wire before they end up as a saddle stitched magazine. Vacuum tubes are involved, can you guess what for?

Find somewhere where you’re going to see a variety of work in progress, ideally including the initial steps such as the creation of printing plates or blocks, setting a machine and filling the ink fountain(s), printing itself, and finally cropping the stock to create the finished product.

What to expect from the printer, a few caveats and some common courtesy:

During my search I emailed a dozen or so printers asking for a few days work experience. Not surprisingly I didn’t hear back from many of them, and few politely refused, and finally 2 were kind enough to offer me a couple of days work.

The printers are running a business and ultimately work comes first. A full workload, or other factors may mean be they’re not in the best position to accommodate you. Don’t worry if you get a few knock backs, just keep approaching printers and you’ll find one.

When someone does offer to have you, it’s unavoidable that you’re going to be somewhat of an inconvenience for them, no matter how minor. They have to show you around, time spent explaining things to you is time not spent working, and assuming everyone wants you to end the day with all your fingers, they’ll be keeping an eye on you throughout the day.

Between the interesting bits, there is some boring work to be done. Deliveries of ink and paper need to be unpacked, active jobs need to be moved from printer, to binder, to guillotine, and finally finished print jobs need to boxed for shipping. It’s reasonably for them to get a little labour of you for the exchange. You really can get a lot from the experience, so be prepared to give a little.

It will be worth it.

What advice would you give budding graphic designers and students to improve their knowledge? Leave a comment and let me (and them) know.

Find work experience at a printing house; Advice for design students/new designers

As a graphic designer and a bit of a whiskey connoisseur, when visiting the bottle-shop for a treat I often find myself wandering around, browsing the logos, labels and packaging design in the whiskey section.

Collected here are a few of my favourite whiskey logos, labels and packaging. (No promises on the quality of the drink for all you whiskey fans out there.)

Jack Daniels 70th and 75th anniversary editions.

Alberta Premium Canadian Rye Whiskey.

Jack Daniels double gold medal edition.

Adirondack New York single malt whiskey.

Jack Daniels pre-mix whiskey & cola, and whiskey & dry.

Jameson Limited Irish whiskey.

Jack Daniels birthday edition.

Revolver single malt whiskey.

Mr. Jacks 160th birthday edition. (Jack Daniels)

Dark Horse Canadian whiskey.

Jack Daniels Honey.

Decadence, by the Compass Box Whiskey Co.

Winter Jack Apple Whiskey Punch.

Mortlach Whiskey.

Jack Daniels White Rabbit.

Nikka pure malt whiskey.

Royal Stag whiskey.

Jack Daniels Sinatra Select.

Knob Creek rye whiskey.

Maiden Voyage single malt whiskey.

Ryesenberg hand bottled whiskey.

Which packaging design would make you buy it?

Leave a comment and let me know.

Wonderful whiskey designs

Over the years, the Microsoft Windows operating system family has had a few solid releases, and a few duds (I’m looking at you, Vista.)

With the recent release of Windows 8 comes a new logo design, and for me, a marked improvement over its predecessors.

Windows 1.0. 1985.

Windows 3.0. 1992

Windows 95, 98 and 2000. 1995 and onwards.

Windows Vista. 2006. (Bad, bad Microsoft.)

Windows 7. 2009. (Redemption!)

Windows 8.

While working on the latest design, Paula Scher from Pentagram, the design firm responsible for the latest design, asked a questions which says it all for me – Paula asked “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?”

I’m yet to use the latest version of the Windows, but as far as branding goes, the latest design works well for me. How about you?

Windows logo design evolution

You’ve no doubt read articles by plenty of other graphic designers and typographers railing against Comic Sans, but they say a picture paints a thousand words.

Comic sans was designed in the early 90′s to be used in, you guessed it, comics. Despite this specific purpose, it’s regularly used and abused for just about anything, however inappropriate.

To demonstrate this, showcased here are a few dozen logo designs of well known brands, parodied in Comic Sans. Courtesy of Oleg Tarasov and the contributors of the Comic Sans Project.

Would people be paying hundreds of dollars for a bottle of perfume with this on the label? I think not.

$100,000 for a car to have this logo on the front?

Or this? No…

How would your perception of these brands differ if they actually did use Comic Sans as the primary typeface of their brand identity? I suspect it would be a great deal.

Comic Sans should not be used for everything. ‘Nough said?

Updated September 21st, with some additional logos.

Comic sans logo parodies

The first subject taught at medical school for prospective doctors? Pretty sure it’s terrible hand writing. My doctor has certainly mastered it. Via Orion Creatives.

Typeface design for doctors

As a client, you’re probably not going to be well versed in the different file formats commonly associated with graphic design and their different purposes. After all, that’s one of the reasons why you’ve hired a designer.

Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to clients being given work in a file format that, while it may be suitable for the project they’re currently working on, is not going to be usable in future projects. An oversight which almost inevitably leads to wasted time and money in the future.

There are dozens of different graphic formats available, .jpg, .gif, .pdf, .psd, .eps and .ai to name just a few. Ultimately, each type is either a raster or vector graphic.

Where the two file types differ, is in their ability to be scaled, a factor which drastically impacts how large a graphic can be printed.

Note: Printing at 300dpi (dots per inch) is typically considered to be “high” or “photo quality”. While this is more a rule of thumb than an absolute, and does vary in practice depending on the circumstances, it’s accurate enough for the examples of this article.

Without going into extraneous detail, a basic explanation of each file type is as follows:

Raster images – such as .jpg and .gif files – offer a fixed resolution only. What this means is, that if you want to print a 1 inch square logo at high quality (as explained above), your .jpg file must be 300 pixels high by 300 pixels wide. (It could be larger, but we’ll leave it that for this discussion.)

In this example, the 300×300 pixels are the entirety of the information contained within the file.

Contrary to what Hollywood spy-movies would have you believe, you can not simply press the “enhance” button to add quality to a photo.

If you imagine a photograph with someone who is so far away that an eye appears to be a few black dots, you can not increase the size of the photo to see the colour of their eye. Likewise, if a person’s cheek appears as a few pixels of beige, you can not increase the size of the photos to see freckles or wrinkles in the skin. This detail and information simply does not exist in the file and cannot be extrapolated out of it.

Vector images – such as .eps and .ai files – work differently. Instead of being a collection of pixels, vector images are basically a set of instructions. Mathematical expressions are used to define points, paths, colours, shapes, thickness, fills and every other aspect of the file on a grid.

Because of this difference, vector graphics can be increased in size without any loss of quality. To double the size of a vector graphic, design software simply increases the numbers in the instructions to recreate the graphic in a larger size.

So when does this difference become a problem?

In my experience, this most often happens are a result of using and inexperienced/amateur designer who is using the wrong tool for the job.

We’ve all heard the expression “photoshopped”. Photoshop is often spoken of as “the” design program, but it’s not the right tool for every job. Photoshop is primarily a raster based program, and as such is limited in creating scalable graphics.

Small business and individuals often start with the basics, this might be just a website logo or a business card. This creates a problem for future projects when their original designer, who did everything in Photoshop as amateurs are prone to doing, has only supplied them with raster format graphic.

I often have people approach me wanting to expand their corporate stationery or marketing materials and have only a website logo or Photoshop business card as reference. When increasing the size of a logo from these kinds of files however, this is the result:

I’ve assembled images here of the Coca-Cola logo blown up from a raster file on the left, and a vector format on the right.

100%

200%

400%

800%

1,200%

The problem is pretty clear. The raster graphic gets worse and worse, while the vector graphic can be scaled to virtually any size without loss of quality.

In order to be scalable, design artwork also needs to be originally created in a vector graphic program such as Adobe Illustrator, not just save with a vector file extension. When asking clients if they can obtain vector format artwork from their previous designer, I’m occasionally supplied with a .jpg file that has simply been saved as an Illustrator .ai file.

This is basically the same as saving a black and white photo in a colour format. The colour information wasn’t there to start with, and saving it into a format doesn’t magically retrieve the colour information. The same applies for vector graphics.

These days the standard vector formats are typically .pdf, .eps and .ai, and there are some others. Without these scalable source files for future design projects, you may have to choose between accepting lower quality display and printed materials, or having your current designer recreate usable versions of your existing work at your expense.

When having a logo designed, or any artwork that may need to be scaled in the future, insist on vector format artwork files. It will save you time and ensure the best results in future projects.

Insist on vector format logo design files

Many of the same questions come up time and time again from design students and fledgling graphic designers. Questions that rank high on the list often revolve around deadlines, charging clients, and how to manage potential clients who have unreasonable expectations.

How to qualify potential clients goes a long way in addressing all 3 of these issues, finding the right clients, and not wasting time on dead end leads.

The following is a recent conversation between myself and a reader of my blog, Chantie Coryell from 6MK, which discusses all these issues.

Chantie asked:

There are so many ways to get fast and cheap logos now that people seem to expect 2-days turnaround time and a $99 invoice. I could probably give a client something in just two days, but will it be a high quality design? Will it be the best graphic representation of their business? No, and I don’t like giving clients a product that I am not proud of (I’m sure most designers feel the same). Good design takes time.

So, my question to you is: what do you typically tell your clients regarding timeframe? I know that every project is different, but if you were to estimate time for a small to medium size identity project, would you tell the client to expect something in weeks? Or months? The logos in this post were likely created after months of work, but non-corporate clients don’t seem willing to wait that long. If I tell a client I need a few weeks to turnaround a project, about 2/3 of the time I hear “a few WEEKS? I don’t think you understand the scope of this project.” Am I slow? Or are some people impatient?

To which I replied:

Time obviously varies depending on the project but as an example, for an individual or small business spending under $1,000 and receiving a logo and business card design, I quote two weeks as a “typical” project.

Obviously for larger scope projects where the client is spending more for development or needs more deliverables, like an identity standards and usage manual, I quote longer.

In my experience, for the example design project above, 2 weeks allows enough time for proper development, presentation, feedback, a couple of revisions if needed, and for everybody to tend to the rest of their daily duties. Both you and your clients will obviously have other things to do during this time. You’re not sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for a job to come in, and you can be sure the client isn’t either.

In regards to your comment “a few WEEKS? I don’t think you understand the scope of this project“, my initial reaction is that they themselves understand the scope of the project.

Having not dealt with any of the people you’re referring to I’m obviously making a few assumptions here, but I suspect one or more of the following will be true in most cases:

A) They have no real interest in getting the work done; I think some people view branding/logo design/stationery etc. as just another setup cost, the same as buying printer toner or office chairs. They know they need something but just want to pick something up and cross it off their ‘to-do’ list. They don’t actually see any value in it.

B) The business isn’t actually ready yet; I get plenty of emails from people along the lines of “I’m starting a [type of] business and need a logo” and give barely any other information.

Often they don’t have a brand name chosen yet, they’re still working on the business model and determining if it’s a sound idea and in most cases (not all obviously, this is just in my experience) it’s a half baked venture which they aren’t going to complete.

C) They’re looking for Champagne design on a beer budget; Pretty self explanatory… People see the good work of a professional designer and the cheap price tag of design contest/stock logo image site (but don’t like the work) and think they can get real work for that price.

Obviously I don’t need to tell you that this can’t work, you’re not going to do 10, 20, 30, 40+ hours of work and match a $99 stock image site, are you…

My advice would be to work out a process of qualifying potential clients to separate the good from the bad. A few things I do are:

1) For emails where people submit barely any information, I refer them to my branding/logo design brief submission page. If I never hear back from them (and I don’t in 90% of the cases mentioned in example “B” above, then that’s the end of it.

If they come back with some proper information and show they’re serious about the design work, then I give them the attention they deserve.

2) A phone call does wonders. Similar to the above point, I find that when I ask to schedule a time for a telephone meeting with someone, if they’re serious about the project they’re eager to speak with me. If they’re not, they typically don’t respond.

3) One thing I bring up early when potentially having a face-to-face meeting with a client, is that I don’t do free pitching/speculative work. Having a 5 or 10 minute conversation with someone over the phone obviously isn’t going to ruin you if it doesn’t go anywhere, but there is the potential to waste hours when going to meetings with unreasonable potential clients.

One of the earliest meetings I had ended with the client saying he’d had some of his best results from design contest sites, before asking me to “just” design 1 logo and 2 websites to see how things go. I declined of course, but wasted half the day in the process. I only ever made that mistake once.

In a nutshell, I think the things to remember are these:

1) There is a saying that goes something along the lines of “1% of your customers give you 99% of your problems”. The people asking for 1 day turnarounds with $99 budgets are these people. You don’t want to work with them.

2) Proper businesses don’t do their work for free, and they don’t expect it of others either. They make educated decisions about the service providers they hire and are willing to spend money in order to receive a service and/or product of proportional value. These are the clients you do want.

3) The hours you spend chasing, haggling and catering to the whims of difficult clients is time you could be spending finding and working with great clients.

Obviously you’ll need to find the right balance and process that works for you, but hopefully that’s been of some help?

Chantie goes on to say:

…I do need to work on my phone skills. I prefer email, so I tend to put-off contacting people who want me to call on the phone. I would be a better businessperson if I called people back right away.

My reply:

Personally I think the phone call is a must. As a perfect example, I’ve just started work with a new client a few days ago who told me that although I didn’t quote her the cheapest price, she felt my response was the best and I had given her the most attention in a timely manner.

She was still waiting for replies to emails from other designers, and in the mean time I’ve spoken with her twice on the phone and closed the deal. If the designers who had quoted her less had beaten me to the phone call, they could have received the project instead of me.

It’s all too easy to deal with clients via email alone, but as mentioned above, in my experience a telephone call is by far the fastest way to separate quality clients from the time wasters.

How do you qualify your clients? Leave a comment and let me know. Image credit.

Qualifying potential clients; Advice for design students/new designers

Mieles Del Desierto De Los Andes.

APIS honey varieties.

Babees pure organic honey.

The Ballard Bee Company.

Bee Honey.

Bee local.

The Bees Knees.

Beeline honey.

Bee Raw.

Black Tar Honey.

Denniston Apiary Honey.

Gruncharov Honey.

Heide Honey.

The Nude Bee Honey Company.

Organic Honey.

The Sheffield Honey Company. A personal favourite in branding…

What do you think?

Which design are you sweet on?

Design as sweet as honey

The starting point for many freelance designers is typically a relatively small webpage, maybe 4 or 5 pages. For the sake of this discussion lets keep it simple and say your website has the usual ‘home’, ‘about me’, ‘design portfolio’ and ‘contact me’ pages.

There are hundreds of other graphic design websites out there, and while we would all like ours to be the one that appears at the top of Google and gets the visitor, if you think logically – and honestly – about it, your brand new website isn’t really any better or more deserving of visitors than any of others that are already online.

The content of these sites is usually pretty similar, right down the wording. There is usually a short spiel about you, a list of the design services you provide, and the images which make up your design graphic portfolio. Just like there are on a hundred other sites. Your portfolio might be spectacular, but at this point there isn’t really anything driving people to you website to see it.

Regular blogging can be an excellent means to overcome this and continually increase the number of potential clients that land on your site.

As mentioned above, you can only fit so-much information into a basic website. By publishing individual articles on branding, logo design, colour, printing, stationery, packaging design, typography, and whatever other topics are relevant to you, you’ll create dozens and eventually hundreds of pages of unique, in-depth content which *is* better and more deserving of visitors than the hundreds of other cookie-cutter design websites you were previously lumped in with.

All unique content gets traffic. It may sound daunting to hear you should publish a several hundred articles in order to get work, and it obviously isn’t going to happen overnight, but with a little regular work it comes together faster than you think.

Each article doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winning novel either. To paraphrase a philosophy that was a passed on to me (and to veer a little into SEO here), you don’t need to write an article which will generate a million visits. You just need to cover topics which will generate a few hundred to a thousand visitors per month (Google offers a keyword tool to help you see how competitive certain keywords/phrase are, and how often they’re searched for, to help you decide what to write about).

Over time, as you publish a dozen, then 50, 100, 200 etc. articles, the total of those “few” hundred visits quickly per article add up to more traffic than you could ever possibly hope to gain with your cookie cutter website. Sales is a numbers game, obviously not every visitor will engage your services, but the more relevant traffic you get, the more business you’ll get.

Continuing to build your blog is a great to build those numbers.

Blog your way to a thriving website

Design contest and other speculative design work websites try and wow potential participants with attractive numbers and golden opportunities. If you whittle these figures down to what they mean for the individual though, the numbers are far from attractive, and the opportunities are few and not nearly as golden.

At some point you’ve probably already heard the regular “pros” and cons of design contests which have been discussed at length elsewhere, so instead of repeating reasons why I believe contests are a waste of time for designers, lets have a look at something more quantifiable. Some average figures for design contests and some cold, hard math.

To quote some numbers from one of the more prominent design contest websites, at the time of writing this article the site currently had 1,564 design contests with a total of $472,907 on offer.

Plenty of projects to choose from and nearly half a million dollars on offer. Sounds good, right? Well, no. We all know the general gist of any contest, you submit your entry(s) and a winner is (usually…) picked. It’s a gamble. Lets crunch a few numbers and see what your chances really are.

Divide those 1,564 contest by the available $472,907 prize pool, and you come out with an average of just over $302 per design contest. That’s hardly a fortune, but if you could get a few wins without spending too long on each that could still be a living perhaps? Lets continue and find out.

The site goes on to state (in order to attract contest holders) that there are an average of 120 designs per contest. With an average of 120 design entries per contest, each individual design has just 0.83% of winning. Not even a 1% chance per entry for it to win, in fact you would have over 3 times as much chance of picking the winning number on a roulette wheel.

“But wait!”, say the contest websites, you can submit multiple entries to improve your chances. You can, but these come at the expense of your time. Submitting 10 entries increases your chances of winning, but also means 10x as much time wasted for every lost contest. More numbers…

Keeping with the average 120 entries per contest, if 12 participants made 10 submissions each they would have an 8.3% chance of winning. If you were to spend just 10 minutes on each design that’s still 1 hour and 40 minutes of your time.

With that chance of winning you’d need to be entering 12 contests in order to win 1. That’s 20 hours of work for 1 win. And this is based on a measly 10 minutes work per design…

The reality is that no original work can be done well in just 10 minutes. The realistic alternatives are pumping out poor quality work that isn’t likely to win, or risk much, much more of your time to create something decent. Either way you’re still burning time and odds of winning are stacked against you. Not to mention the obvious that if you’re spending the required time to create quality work that clients will constantly pay for, why not just sell your services on a professional basis like every other business out there?

Looking at the flip side of coin for a minute… At a glance, the benefit of getting multiple designers for the price of one might seem like a no-brainer for clients thinking about holding a design contest. But knowing the above, what kind of work can you really expect to get? 3 possibilities come to mind for me.

• Cheap and nasty work churned out in the hope of winning by volume, not quality.
• At best, you could receive recycled ideas that have previously been given and will continue to be presented to any number of other businesses. At worst, you could (and many have) receive work that was blatantly stolen, which can lead to copyright and legal issues down the road when you receive a call from someone who has discovered you’ve copied their intellectual property.
• Or, you could receive work from a designer who is happy to spend days researching and developing creative and original work that will help your business stand out, all in the hope that maybe they’ll be paid something for their time, but are happy to accept nothing if the contests goes that way.

Only 2 of those seem at all likely to me.

This is also assuming that there actually is a winner. On the majority of design contest sites the contest holders are under no obligation to pick a winner at all and can simply withdraw their offer with no penalty once they’ve been presented with all the ideas.

You can fiddle with the figures all you like, and some will probably shine a more positive light on your chances of winning a design contest, but over a longer timeline the figures just don’t lie, and I’m yet to see an example or hear an argument which demonstrates a consistent benefit for graphic designers.

All opinions aside, taking part in design contests just doesn’t add up to time well spent.

Design contests just don’t add up

A question every new designer and student inevitably asks is “how much do I charge for my work?”. If you asked a business professor to sum it up for you, it wouldn’t be unusual to be told “charge what the market will bear”.

This is definitely not to say that you should attempt to gouge clients on price. Many in the graphic design industry rely heavily on customer loyalty and repeat business in order to thrive, and nothing puts people off more than being unfairly treated on price. On the flip side, nothing makes a client happier than being quoted less than they had budgeted for (as I’ve done on several occasions).

It is however an important philosophy to understand when developing your price strategy.

A classic example of charging what the market will bear (and this is more on the opportunistic/price gouging side of things which I’m definitely not advocating…) is when it rains. On a sunny day a retailer may sell an umbrella for $30, while on a rainy day they may sell the same umbrella for $50. Whether or not this is a good or bad decision depends on the type of business.

If you’re running a street stall (business type A) where business depends entirely on random passers-by with whom you have no existing relationship, who have no loyalty to your business, have no prior previous reference of pricing, and who won’t likely be repeat business, you stand to make a tidy little profit with little to no negative long term consequences.

If, on the other hand, you’re running an established retail store (business type B) where customers often will have shopped with you before, have previous reference of your pricing and are the people mostly likely to make a future purchase with you as they have developed some loyalty towards you, by increasing your prices to take advantage of a rainy day you will make a quick buck, but you’ll likely burn a bridge in the process. This is a short term gain in exchange for a long term loss.

Graphic design is a type B business. For me, around 30%-40% of my income is derived from repeat business. I’ve heard from others who claim to receive around 80% of their income from repeat business. That’s a significant amount of business you’re likely to lose if you’re seen to be hiking up prices at every opportunity. It’s also not going to be good for word of mouth business.

In the type B industry that is graphic design, charging what the market will bear means setting a fair price which reflects your abilities and the quality of your work, while remaining inside your desired clients budget. While this sounds pretty straightforward, it’s often an area where things start to come apart for students and new designers. A few common situations and thought processes which lead to this are:

“I’m new to the field/I’ve only just started my business” – Obviously if you’re fresh out of the gate, there isn’t going to be any buzz around you, and you won’t yet have any reputation to trade on. This isn’t to say though that your work is automatically worth less. Assuming the quality of your work is equivalent to that of an established, sought after designer, there’s no reason you shouldn’t/can’t charge equivalent rates. Quality speaks for itself, and there are plenty of people who prioritise quality over price.

Starting out doing cheap jobs with the hope of building to big ones. – To borrow a quote from a LinkedIn discussion I took part in some time ago, “you really benefit from providing a cheap service that boasts great results.” This is something I disagree with.

As an example, if you’ve decided that your hourly rate is $50 but as a starter you do a 20 hour website project at half price – $500. At the end of the day the client has their website, and you only have half your fee. Ok, so you didn’t make what you wanted, but there is the potential for more business, right? Well, no.

People these days often have stakes in multiple businesses, and should the client you did a job for at half price come back to you in the future looking for another website, as you’ve already set the precedent of $500 there is simply no way to justify to them doubling your price for the same product. If you had a meal at a restaurant for $100 on Monday, would you pay $200 for the same meal on Tuesday? Of course not.

The same problem occurs if a client has been referred to you by word of mouth. They will not pay $1,000 for something they know their colleague just received for $500.

Your work is worth what it’s worth. Discounting purely for the sake of discounting is of no benefit.

Typical reasoning from new designers with somefirst hand experience and knowledge of their usual clientele is usually something along the lines of “If I quote $1,000 for design X they will probably go somewhere else” and that “I’d rather have cheap work than none at all”.

Both are valid points, but charging $500 because that’s what your market will bear is different to charging $500 because you’re new to the field. I know it might sound like I’m nitpicking here, but there is an important distinction between the two.

The difference is in the mindset. Over the years you will have to increase your prices, as all businesses do. If you’re charging lower than your ideal price but you’re conscience of what people will and won’t pay, you’ll know when to increase your prices. If you’re charging lower than your ideal price because you’re new, inexperience or think you’re otherwise undeserving of a higher rate, you’ll never get out of the habit of undercharging.

I’m a big believer in the old adage “An honest days work for an honest days pay.” Charging what the market will bear isn’t about squeezing a few extra out of a client. It’s about earning the best, fair rate for all that hard work you do. Image credit.

Charging what the market will bear; Advice for design students/new designers