We were just thinking,

Often when pric­ing cre­ative ser­vices we tend to for­get all the lit­tle hid­den costs. Sud­denly you real­ize all the cost os all the “free” pens you pro­cured from the sup­ply closet you were so fond of raid­ing at the office. Last week I wrote about the basics of pric­ing and I think this arti­cle from Free­lance Schools does a great job of high­light some of those hid­den expenses. I was not being paid the “hid­den” costs which the…

It always hap­pens when a designer approaches me to ask how do they make the leap to inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor the first ques­tion is, ”how much do I charge per hour?” I guess the answer to this depends on how far down the rab­bit hole you are pre­pared to go. The short of it is you should be quot­ing your rate on a project basis but track­ing, and think­ing of it, as hourly.   First rule of pric­ing; don’t low­ball yourself…

I think the best thing to come out of the web design/​​development move­ment is the recent trend towards research-​​​​driven design. While noth­ing new to the big dogs on Madi­son Ave, it gen­er­ally is over­looked in the print world—especially on such a gran­u­lar level and rapid level. This is cer­tainly a trick more print design­ers need keep up their sleeves. At its core, A/​​B test­ing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two ver­sions of an ele­ment (A…

Another good read on the cur­rent deval­u­a­tion of cre­ative services—this time from the per­spec­tive of a Copy­writer. If you’re Web or Graphic Designer who has had the priv­i­lege of work­ing with a good copy­writer than you know they are more than a glo­ri­fied spell check, and how much eas­ier they can make your job. I’ve about had my fill of the cheap copy debate. In truth, there isn’t one. If you’ve got a com­plaint about copy­writ­ers charg­ing too much, you’ve…

Some­times you have to stop and con­sider what the long-​​​​term cost is by sav­ing a few dol­lars by skimp­ing on the ser­vices of a qual­ity designer. I won­der how many sales were lost from this? I bet it cost more than had they payed the designer. Client: “That’s way too much money to charge for an email cam­paign. It’s not hard to put a few graph­ics in an email.” Me: “I charge based off of my reg­u­lar hourly rate and that’s…