best practices tag

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…

Is the bad client a fact of busi­ness or a crutch when things go awry? If you have direct con­tact with clients at some point your going to get your­self into a work­ing rela­tion­ship, which doesn’t. It’s one of those unavoid­able things in life—like death and taxes. Few sub­jects for free­lancers gen­er­ate more dis­cus­sions than how to work with less-​​​​than-​​​​ideal clients. It’s sim­ply a fact of doing busi­ness not every rela­tion­ship is going to gel.