Glimpses of Genius, Beauty and Novelty- It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

• More money equals less pain- Dip your hand in extremely hot water to find out if it’s true…

• Test your photoshop error-finding skills- What’s wrong with this picture?

• Harmony in the studio- Designers and Programmers are in sync.

• The fate of newspapers- What’s your take on the whole thing?

• Evaluate the situation- A real life client situation.

• Be an olympic photographer- Action sequence mode challenge.

• Ring! Ring! Ring!- Just let it go.

We Respectfully Disagree.

A battle of the advertising industry since the beginning of time, overpraising and under-delivering still goes on today.

After all, most agencies are competing for business- they feel a need to promise great things to seem more valuable than their competition and sometimes those promises get a little over the top.

A recent discussion in this AdAge article got us thinking, though. Someone commented that it’s unfair to show work in your portfolio done by employees who no longer work there.

We respectfully disagree, at least from a small studio standpoint.

We work as a team, and just because the design of a project may have been done by someone who has moved on doesn’t mean several of us didn’t have a hand in the finished product. There’s the art direction, proofing, fact checking, and suggestions. We consider that our own work. Very rarely does a project get completed that several of us haven’t touched in one way or another.

Similarly, we think a studio is a place that fosters creativity. It’s quite possible that no matter who did the project, the concept couldn’t have been duplicated outside the context generated within our walls.

We don’t put anything in our portfolio that we’re not extremely proud of- and part of that is being proud of the employees we hired to create it. No matter if it didn’t work out in the end- it still happened and we’re happy something good came out of it. We think that says something about the studio we are, and try to be.

It’s another reason we’re grateful for our small, natural size.

Quote for the day: on Problem Solving.

“Everything depends upon execution; having just a vision is no solution.”
– Stephen Sondheim

The Grand Old Tradition of Selling a Package Deal.

This article by the ever-audience-dividing 37Signals needs addressing.

Every year or so we think about publishing prices for our projects. Every year we don’t. Many times our new clients fit exactly in the same launchpad as the previous occupant. We’re not formulaic, but there are similarities.

There’s a tendency, the longer we’re in business to just propose costs based on our previous averages. Every time we start to feel these blinders start to crowd our eyes we do our best to take them off and see the wide world again.

The only reason we’re in business – the only reason – is because it is incredibly fun and challenging to reinvent the wheel every single time we get a project. We love solving problems with design. Challenge us with a budget! We would like to think we can fit more inside it than someone down the street. It’s fun to try.

We do understand that there is a lot of money to be made by selling simple kits to people who only need simple kits. But starting a sausage factory probably would make money, too…

Craftsmen have always charged for their time, and their knowledge. We would very much like to think that web development should be looked upon as an artisanal trade, and should be priced as such.

A Word on Restraint.

Restraint

Restraint is one of the most important exercises for a designer to practice… also one of the most difficult. When you have a bunch of great ideas, it’s human nature to want to implement them all at once. Don’t do it. Take only the one or two ideas you can implement most effectively, and leave the rest for another project.