r2witco

un:

artfortune:

1. “Do this one cheap (or free) and we’ll make it up on the next one.”
2. “We never pay a cent until we see the final product.”
3. “Do this for us and you’ll get great exposure! The jobs will just pour in!”
4. On looking at sketches or concepts: “Well, we aren’t sure if we want to use you yet, but leave your material here so I can talk to my partner/investor/wife/clergy.”
5. “Well, the job isn’t CANCELLED, just delayed. Keep the account open and we’ll continue in a month or two.”
6. “Contract? We don’t need no stinking contact! Aren’t we friends?”
7. “Send me a bill after the work goes to press.”
8. “The last guy did it for XXX dollars.”
9. “Our budget is XXX dollars, firm.
10. “We are having financial problems. Give us the work, we’ll make some money and then we’ll pay you.”

(via)

yah, heard every one. (and endless variations.) Honestly though designers only get this more because our industry is shrouded by mystery and misunderstanding. All sorts of creatives are undervalued.

- A lack of knowledge or ability to estimate the actual time it takes to design edit send off files ,etc. Get your client educated and involved in the process, leaving it a mystery and padding your hours doesn’t help you in the end. (And yes often they don’t want to know.)

- A lack of understanding about the non-billable hours that go into a creative’s headspace. If I am thinking about your logo at 1:00am, how can I bill you for that? Creatives are processing machines, our brains don’t punch a time card. Like lawyers we have tons of software, industry, and business info to keep up on, I cannot bill you for the two hour Flash upgrade, doing the whole project only to find out there is a bug, and redoing it in the old version. Or being caught at press with a corrupt font file and having to spend a day manually recreate it in Fontagrapher.

This is why I can’t do freelance work, my brain just can’t handle it. I much prefer to find a full-time gig with a decent hourly wage or salary. It makes it easier on everyone.