Doing design work for someone as a "favour"
Posted: Tue 07 Jun, 2011 00.02
I want to have a rant and wonder if any of the other designers on here can relate to any of the following.
The scenario: you get speaking to a friend, or a friend of a friend, who owns a business or is in the process of setting one up. They talk excitedly about wanting a really cool design, and foolishly you offer to do them a logo, a website or a brochure, or a combination thereof as a freebie, thinking to yourself: "it'll be a bit of fun, I enjoy letting my creative juices flow, and it should only take a few hours."
I've fallen into this trap at least a dozen times over the years (I'm obviously too soft), and keep seeing the same outcomes:
• They don't appreciate the calibre of the original concepts you supply to them ("It's great, we love it BUT... can you just totally change everything"), and try to steer things in the direction of their utterly crap idea ("I want the logo to be a map of Cheshire with a picture of a fleet of taxis superimposed on it, with a little cartoon man standing next to it waving a flag, with a picture of a leopard on the flag").
• When they ask for a website, they haven't got the faintest idea of what they want to put on it. They haven't got any photos or content to go on there.
• They don't appreciate that graphic design is a separate discipline to copywriting, and expect you to also write all the copy for their brochure/website, even when their business is a specialised product/service that you know absolutely nothing about. I was once asked to write several paragraphs about why these pneumatic actuation valves are ideal for applications where high levels of resistance to corrosion are required.
• They say "I tried to change the design on the file you sent me but I can't" - no, that's because you haven't got the right software and I didn't intend for you to edit the file. I'm the designer, not you.
• They appear surprised when you tell them that actually getting stuff printed will cost them money - they originally thought, when you said you were a graphic designer, that you also had a printing press, a guillotine and a perforator in your garage and that you would print everything for little or no cost.
• They don't appreciate that the PDFs you e-mailed them were 72 dpi files for their on-screen perusal, and try to print them out on their £39.99 Hewlett Packard inkjet printer and use them as actual brochures.
• Finally realising that they don't want to spend money on printing, and that they haven't actually got a clue what they want, they end up saying "we love what you've done but we're putting everything on hold for the time being."
I don't know of any other industry besides graphic design where the tradesman's role and talent is so under-appreciated and misunderstood.
The scenario: you get speaking to a friend, or a friend of a friend, who owns a business or is in the process of setting one up. They talk excitedly about wanting a really cool design, and foolishly you offer to do them a logo, a website or a brochure, or a combination thereof as a freebie, thinking to yourself: "it'll be a bit of fun, I enjoy letting my creative juices flow, and it should only take a few hours."
I've fallen into this trap at least a dozen times over the years (I'm obviously too soft), and keep seeing the same outcomes:
• They don't appreciate the calibre of the original concepts you supply to them ("It's great, we love it BUT... can you just totally change everything"), and try to steer things in the direction of their utterly crap idea ("I want the logo to be a map of Cheshire with a picture of a fleet of taxis superimposed on it, with a little cartoon man standing next to it waving a flag, with a picture of a leopard on the flag").
• When they ask for a website, they haven't got the faintest idea of what they want to put on it. They haven't got any photos or content to go on there.
• They don't appreciate that graphic design is a separate discipline to copywriting, and expect you to also write all the copy for their brochure/website, even when their business is a specialised product/service that you know absolutely nothing about. I was once asked to write several paragraphs about why these pneumatic actuation valves are ideal for applications where high levels of resistance to corrosion are required.
• They say "I tried to change the design on the file you sent me but I can't" - no, that's because you haven't got the right software and I didn't intend for you to edit the file. I'm the designer, not you.
• They appear surprised when you tell them that actually getting stuff printed will cost them money - they originally thought, when you said you were a graphic designer, that you also had a printing press, a guillotine and a perforator in your garage and that you would print everything for little or no cost.
• They don't appreciate that the PDFs you e-mailed them were 72 dpi files for their on-screen perusal, and try to print them out on their £39.99 Hewlett Packard inkjet printer and use them as actual brochures.
• Finally realising that they don't want to spend money on printing, and that they haven't actually got a clue what they want, they end up saying "we love what you've done but we're putting everything on hold for the time being."
I don't know of any other industry besides graphic design where the tradesman's role and talent is so under-appreciated and misunderstood.
