commentary

Dear Foursquare, it’s over between us. We’ve been at this four months and our test run of location-​​​​based ser­vices has been, well, unspec­tac­u­lar. After oscil­lat­ing between the Foursquare and Gowalla clients (both of which we found to be very flaky) we’ve seen lit­tle pay of for the poten­tial mar­ket­ing (and stalker) info we’ve provided.

It’s been a cou­ple months since the Apple/​​HTML 5 vs Adobe/​​Flash wars began and I am con­tin­u­ally amazed how much atten­tion this topic receives. While the tech­nol­ogy dri­ving the media we con­sume is an impor­tant dis­cus­sion, it’s not the con­ver­sa­tion which needs to be tak­ing place. What’s being glossed over is this; why, in 2010, are we still dis­cussing code instead of content?

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.

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…