To respect the upcoming Idul Fitri national holiday, our office will be closed on Tuesday, September 30, 2008, and we will be back open on Monday, October 5, 2008. Most of us will not be in the office, but we’ll still be reachable by email. Happy Eid Mubarak to all of you who celebrate.
Just what a friend of mine used to say…
I just got this off a mailing list, this is just hilarious 
A few days back, we had a problem with two of our line of UPS at the office. It turns out that the ones we used for the networking equipment and the PC didn’t have any automatic voltage regulators built in. And when we measured the voltage, guess what? It’s only 170 volts. It was simply nothing and far below what our nation’s electric company promised their customers: A full load of 220 volts. I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. The problem is, the voltage downsize happens during broad daylight. We would probably understand better if it happened while we’re not working late at nights.
Enough is enough, we decided to purchase an APC Line-R 600I AVR and had it delivered to the office. So far so good, it steps up or steps down (which is unlikely) the unstable voltage as needed. We installed it for the networking equipment for the time being, as that is far more crucial than the PC in the corner of the office.
We’re going to see how this goes, and if it succeeds curing our electrical voltage problem, we’ll get another one for the PC.
For the past 9 years, it’s not rare that we get quotation requests from various people on a certain fee to do a certain project. Some of them, however, were replied with the “it’s only something simple, and that is so expensive” sentence. So the question is, how do you value design? Design is an integral part of a thing being developed, no matter it’s a product for the mass market, or a poster for as simple as a private concert, design is important. It’s the fundamental of all things when you are trying to convey a certain message to your target market. So if that message is valuable to upscale your business, does that make design important? By all means, yes.
Designers like us often faced with the reality of intimidation from clients that approached us with the low-price-tag-but-good-results expectation. In reality, unless you are designers who eat stone and never thought that you have bills to pay, things like this just won’t happen.
Many clients of this type simply doesn’t understand that a design involves a lot of things to consider, and that a good and professional designer has certain methodologies that must be applied to their creation. Making flyers is just not about putting text on a single piece of paper. Even our grandmas could do that on Microsoft Word, have it photocopied, and voila! She created flyers for herself. No. Design is something much more important. A design should be readable, legible, and most of all understandable.
I’m going to take identity design as an example. Most people, although I absolutely believe not all, who did not go to a design school often don’t realize that their company’s identity and brand is important. Some people and almost all of our clients luckily understand this. A common mistake is that identity is often treated as an add-on to whatever product we have in the future. This is probably the very beginning on why people often say “it’s only a logo, we could have it done for $50 somewhere else.” Sure you can, but then a company with a logo worth $50, compared with another company of the same size who invested on a logo worth 100 times than that, perfectly made, can last much longer, and have a deep impact to their customers would have a better, more prominent, and more credibility to the eye of a regular person, who at first doesn’t even know what this company is all about. A friend of mine, a very eccentric designer, used to say, “If a company wants to make a logo for 10 bucks, then that is the image of their company. As low and as cheap as ten bucks. How can you expect good service from them?” While I may not be that extreme, he may have a good point in his argument.
So how come your nephew can charge you $50 for a logo, and a designer can charge you even up to millions of dollars for an identity design? It’s the methodology and the work involved. Here’s the breakdown. When a real designer designs a logo, there are things to be consider, such as:
And so on… This is why a good logo can never be done overnight. Can you imagine what Apple would be now if they decided to stick to their first illustrative logo? I can’t imagine that on an iPod. So, with this in mind, I assume that many of you agree on why we can’t charge $50 for a corporate identity, no?
A good designer never overcharge a client. They charge reasonably for what they achieved for the client. I’m not going to shamelessly promote that our company is a good one nor we don’t overcharge, but when you find a respectable company charging you a fee for something, trust me, they usually do that with lots of considerations that is useful for you, but didn’t even cross your mind. Something wannabe designers doesn’t seem to care.