Fast, Good & Cheap

Posted by ryan as Bummer, Ca$h, Career, Design

I’ve been creating spoiled clients. Its my own fault really. I do things for free. I spend a great deal more time on a project than I should, and I never settle for work that I’m not really proud of. While that may be a great thing to offer a client, what I am realizing is that I’m making my job harder. For one, all the free little things become an expected service. They don’t think, wow he really hooked that up for me. Instead what I do is create a situation where they don’t want to pay for any little thing. “Oh, you did that free last time”. The other thing I’ve been doing is offering prices that are far too low. I also deliver on a very timely basis.

Recently I gave an insanely low quote on a logo redesign. There were a couple reasons I did this. One was that the client has in the past been easy to work with. We never went round for round on changes and it seemed like they knew what they wanted, which allowed me to get the end results in a reasonable amount of time. Oh but things have caught up with me this time. I spent about 3 times the amount of time I quoted for the project. Which brings my profit for time about -200 percent for time spent and stress created. The last thing I need to do is stress out about 5 on going concurrent projects at work and then come home to work on another 10 logos. This one really felt like I was shooting in the dark for what they wanted. I think for them, they wanted to look like the scene they were trying to foster while at the same time have a look that visually conflicted with that very scene. Ah you live and learn.

Which brings me to what this post is about. The Fast, Good, & Cheap pricing method.

Have you ever heard of the Fast, Good, Cheap pricing method?

The idea is that clients should only be able to choose 2 of these 3 words, and you have to keep this in mind when pricing your next job. If you don’t, your work / income / career could be suffering.
Fast, Good or Cheap — Choose Two

If you allow your clients to have fast, good, cheap work designed by yourself then most likely you are working your butt off for very little return which is why you must allow them to choose a combination of two only — either good & fast, good & cheap, fast & cheap.

Read the rest of this article here.

The State Of The Internet

Posted by ryan as Bummer, Ca$h, Career, Interweb

Over at Dark Motion there is an article called “What an Informative Web!“.

Our Internet is still very new, but has come a long way since its humble beginnings ‘74. We’ve seen a lot happen over the past few decades, but perhaps our most important boom has been in the last 4 years. Yep, that stupid buzzword labeled ”web 2.0’.

In the early stages, we saw level 2 & 3 services (as O’Reilly called them) that spawned useful tools en masse. Flickr, eBay, digg, del.icio.us – a haven for geeks and a wealth of valuable resources. Functionality and logical, ergonomic design worked in unison to deliver widely accessible media. It became a point of transition. Designers started gearing layout toward typographic readability; allowing the new wealth of information to be presented in improved, pleasant and meaningful formats.

This is a great read on the state of web. He mentions vision, and what the web has become. Its true, the web is becoming a focus less jumble of trivial pursuits. It has been growing in this direction for quite some time now. Of course if the only goal is money, then results will be a lot like another media we know so well. TV’s focus on the green has shown us that the largest common denominator can supply us with plenty of time wasting meaningless moving pictures. So blah. There is still hope. This medium is young. We can do and offer substance. Its not going to be one way or the other though, its going to get worse with the overload of crap. We are not even to the stage were we are bombarded with crap the second we step out of our house. That time is coming. It will get annoyingly ugly, and then, only when its gets too bad will we all decide to take it back. Lets not loose hope, and do what we can to make the online experience a rewarding and rich experience. We owe it to ourselves, and to others out there, like Pasquale D’Silva, who is not alone in feeling that we may be getting caught up in the hype, and only receiving the short end of the information highway’s offerings.

I should add that Pasquale D’Silva is a talented illustrator animator and you should check his blog for great examples of his work and more.

Ca$h Rules Everything Around Me

Posted by ryan as Ca$h, News

C.R.E.A.M. get the money!

I just came across this nice budget calculator on CNBC. Useful if you need to keep those purse strings from running wild on ya.