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The Importance of Branding: Part Three

Posted on July 5th, 2011 by emdash in Design, Opinion

This post is continued from The Importance of Branding: Part Two

So, if a truly effective branding strategy involves a multi-step process, and you’re starting off your company without wanting to spend any money on a logo design, what can you do?

I’d argue that, even if you can’t afford a true designer working on your brand (which can cost as little as $600,) getting a “cheap” logo as filler for now is not the way to go. Here’s why:

  • Most of those cheap/easy/free logo creation/crowdsource websites are full of copyright infringed ideas. If you can’t afford $600 to spend on marketing yourself, you certainly can’t afford a lawsuit for using copyrighted material for your brand.
  • If your logo looks cheap, the general public (your potential customers) will assume your product or service is low quality.
  • Tracking down every usage ever (especially online!) of your cheap, temporary logo and replacing it with a better one later will cost you time and money.
  • By using a design studio or designer from the get-go, you forge a working relationship with someone who can partner with you on future projects and assist you with your marketing strategy.
  • A logo created by a true designer or studio will be technically sound enough to use on all your materials, including signage. Most of those crowdsourcing sites feature “designers” who only work in Photoshop – which can’t be enlarged with any degree of quality.

Okay, let’s say you’re not convinced and still won’t hire a professional to develop your brand. (This is the equivalent of me trying to replace my bathroom sink myself instead of calling in a plumber, but I digress.) Here’s what I’d do, if I were you, until you can afford a professional firm:

  1. Decide on a name. Then make a list of 50 or so other names. Then narrow your list down to 10 or so. Then ask 10 of your friends to pick one. Chances are, the name you first came up with wasn’t as good as the new, popular one.
  2. Make absolutely sure the name isn’t taken. In addition to looking on Google, check your Yellow Pages and try alternate spellings. You do not want to be confused with another company. (Note: if you’re a sole proprietor, good for you – you can use your full name! But if your name is Jane Smith, you might want to consider Step 1.)
  3. Go on fonts.com and select a legible, non-silly font that is clean and easy to read, even at small sizes. Buy the font and its full license option.
  4. Type your new company name in this font.
  5. Every time you need to use your logo on a letterhead, business card, or sign, just provide the font files and instructions on how it should be typeset. Bonus: pick a colour they can match.
  6. Now, when it comes time for you to hire a professional, they can build on an existing brand rather than get exasperated with the dreadful cheap clipart you paid $50 for on a crowdsourcing website.

Let’s show an example. Let’s say I’m starting up a florist shop. My friends unanimously agreed that my company’s best name would be “Fiori”. Not very original, but it is fun to say.

fonts.com search

Fonts.com search for "elegant" and "floral"

I used keywords “elegant” and “floral” to search on fonts.com. I lucked out – without too much searching about, I found a font that felt like me. I love Art Deco, and the style really took off in Italy, and my shop name is Italian. Plus, I can see that curly R working well with the wrought iron in front of my floral shop.

fonts.com

I can preview my text on fonts.com before buying a logo font

As a last step, I’ve decided the name should be written in leaf green. Now I’ve got enough to start my business – I can give the colour and font to a signmaking company, as well as a copy place that’ll make my business cards and flyers.

The FIORI temporary brand

The FIORI temporary logo

And down the road, when I decide my business needs a bigger and better brand? I can hire a professional who can refresh my temporary logo and create something more consistent and unique.

Crap Photoshop

Cute branding. Additional photo credit: Colin Smith at http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/3972

(In Part Four, I’ll talk about refreshing a brand and what it means.)

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The Importance of Branding: Part Two

Posted on June 27th, 2011 by emdash in Design, Opinion, Pixel Foundry

Branding Done Right

This post is continued from The Importance of Branding: Part One

Aside from the obvious difference in quality, what differentiates a professional designer or studio when it comes to branding, versus crowdsourced or bidding-based websites? The intensive process we go through, from creative brief to finished files, more than justifies hiring a pro. At Chestnut St. Pixel Foundry, our design process for a branding project goes through many steps:

1. The consultation. We want to meet the client and see their place of business. We want to find out more about them: their overall marketing strategy, their current customers, the customers they’d like to have (sometimes they’re not the same as current customers!), who they see as their competitors, what their goals are as a business, everything that could be relevant to the project and even things that might not be. To determine the best brand for a business/client means we need to know everything about them. This is something a one-paragraph writeup on a crowdsourcing design website can never do.

2. The creative brief. This document is invaluable, and we create one for every project at the Foundry. The creative brief lists everything we need to get started: a rough design direction and other creative considerations, any technical considerations, the target market, the project objectives, and a key message (this is, in one simple sentence, what we need to achieve with this project.) Some of the cheap crowdsource/bidding sites ask you, the client, to submit a creative brief. As the client, you may be too close to the project to objectively write a creative brief that will prove to be useful. This is why we create our own, even if our client provides one for us.

3. Research. This step is one inexperienced designers often miss. Even if a designer is creating a logo for a friend as a favour, they should spend several hours looking at other examples of branding in the same industry. They should analyze what trends keep coming up, so they can avoid them and come up with something truly original. For a vintage clothing store that specializes in late 1980s and early 1990s fashion, I spent several hours looking at retro music videos and hip hop posters from the era. (Research can be fun!)

F AS IN FRANK vintage clothing logo sketches

Just some of the sketches I produced for the F AS IN FRANK brand

4. Sketch sketch sketch. On average, we generate over a hundred sketches per person at the Foundry per branding project, before even touching a computer mouse. The sketch process allows us to develop something that’s actually good rather than simply polished. This is a crucial step for any graphic designer, and one which the untrained bidders on crowdsource websites won’t even consider.

5. The percolation of ideas. You can sit down with a sketchbook and strain to come up with something amazing, but it doesn’t always happen. Creativity can be random sometimes. I carry a sketchbook with me everywhere and sometimes find myself doodling project ideas and potential solutions on the bus, waiting to meet up with a friend, or while I’m sitting waiting for software to install. Inspiration can happen anytime. Sometimes a good solution won’t come until the very last minute, after developing the hell out of another idea.

6. Review sketches critically. Stepping back and judging ideas critically is something that takes a lot of practice. It’s not enough that the branding solution is a good idea; it must fulfill the design and marketing objectives for our client! This is where the creative brief comes out again. Logo contenders get pitted against the creative brief – if the logo fails to meet an objective, it’s not a good solution, not matter how clever a design.

Why do we do sketch so many logos that’ll never see the light of day? Well, most ideas that are generated are, unfortunately, crap. Even the most talented designer is going to come up with some real garbage during the creative process. The first dozen or so sketches will likely be obvious, cliché solutions. It’s important to get it down in the sketchbook so that we can move on to something better and more original.

Angelina logos: various concepts shown to the client

Tight concepts/sketches shown to a client with a web development business

7. Tight sketches for client review. For the first (and often second & third round), we don’t show refined vector logos to our clients. They take a look at black-and-white sketches we’ve produced, to get an idea of the general concept and design we’re thinking of. There are two reasons for this: 1) Many hours can be spent working on a vectorized (i.e. computer-produced) logo version. It’s a waste of our time to produce many of these for client review and 2) showing sketches prevents our clients from getting too hung up on details like the font, colour, line thickness, etc.

Though I’ve written this out as a series of steps, it’s often cyclical… at any point in the process we often go back to sketches to refine and tweak the logo solution.

Vector logo: outlines & selection showing vector points

Vector logo: outlines & selection showing vector points

8. Getting on a computer. When the client is happy with the solution, then (and only then) we’ll create a vectorized version. This will go through a huge amount of tweaking. We’ll do dozens of printouts to check letter-spacing and legibility at small sizes. Often several versions of the logo will be created, with thicker lines for small sizes, alternate versions for use on dark backgrounds, etc. We always create logos in vector (that is, scalable) format. Anything else is useless to you – you cannot make a raster image larger without loss of quality. (Note: raster refers to pixel-based file formats, like .tif, .jpg and .png.)

Graphic Standards manual - F AS IN FRANK

Example page from a graphic standards manual

9. The Graphic Standards Manual. This is an optional step and an extra cost, but oh so worth it if you’ll have non-professionals (e.g. desktop publishers and office administrators) working with your logo. The Graphic Standards Manual includes notes on which file formats to use for what, which versions of the logo to use for different applications, which colours (in CMYK, RGB, Pantone and html-ready hex) the logo should appear in, which fonts match well to the logo, etc. It’ll also include important information like: don’t stretch the logo. Don’t put it overtop a busy background. Things which you may think are obvious, but people without a graphic design background love to ruin your brand’s legibility.

There you have it: the 9 step process we use at the Foundry for every branding project. How many of these steps will the “designer” on that cheap crowdsourcing site go through? Step 8. That’s all. They won’t bother to do anything else. And the results speak for themselves.

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The Importance of Branding – Part One

Posted on June 13th, 2011 by emdash in Design, Opinion

Or: The Case Against Quick and Cheap Logos for your Brand

I can’t stress enough the importance, and extent, of branding for anyone in business. I’ve been inspired (by the existence of crowdsourcing websites that deliver cheap and fast logos) to write a series of posts detailing branding for business. I’m going to write about its importance, how not to do it and why to avoid those websites like the plague, how the Pixel Foundry approaches the design process, and how to get by without solid branding until you can afford to hire a professional. Obviously too much to write in one post.

What is branding?

Branding for business goes beyond a mere logo. It involves typography choices, colour palettes, layout and design style to create a mood surrounding your company. All these pieces come together to create an impression your customers are not likely to forget. A good brand is engaging… without even talking to a sales person, a potential customer or client should already have an idea of your company’s personality, professionalism, and overall identity.

Branding extends to the interior design of your office, retail location, or place of business; the colour of your company car; the advertising campaigns you run… these are things that should be carefully considered if you really want to make an impact.

Consider the fake banners I’ve posted below. Neither of these have the company name or logo on them at all, but anyone living in Vancouver will likely instantly recognize the brand!

Most people just think branding involves getting a logo created for them, though.

Which is where the cheap logo design crowdsourcing websites come in. You can set a price for the “winning” design, and ask for hundreds of submissions from designers around the world, and pick the best one. The average logo price on these websites appears to be around $250.00 – not bad for an hour’s work in Illustrator or Photoshop. This probably sounds like an attractive deal to the small business starting up, compared to agency/studio rates in their home town.

What’s wrong with this picture? Aside from the dubious quality of the design work (anyone can create an account and upload submissions), these hopeful designers know next to nothing about your company except your name. They don’t know your brand’s personality. They don’t know the kind of customer/client relationship you want to aspire to. They sometimes don’t even know what your business actually does. This is logo design at its worst: completely irrelevant to the client’s needs. Save your money and spend it on a nice font instead, is my advice.

So how should the logo design process go? In my next post, I’ll tell you how we approach it at Chestnut St. Pixel Foundry. :)

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Lessons in Startup: The Personal Cost of Entrepreneurship

Posted on April 29th, 2011 by emdash in Lessons in Startup, Opinion, Pixel Foundry

Alternate Title: Help, My Friends Have Forgotten I Exist

When you’re working for yourself starting up your own business, it truly becomes your sole focus in life. The long hours, combined with the fact your work doesn’t leave you at the end of the day, can leave you too drained for anything else.

I’d never try to talk someone out of starting up a small business (quite the opposite, I’d argue many of the reasons people talk themselves out of chasing their dreams are invalid) but it’s important to know that you’ll have to make a lot of sacrifices for the first while.

Here are some of the things you can expect:

Love & Romance: You’ll be busy starting up your company and won’t have time for these things. Well, okay, that’s an overgeneralization. If you’re already in a relationship, your long hours devoted to your business can put strain on things. Your partner might end up feeling jealous, then weird about feeling jealous. You may find you want to devote time to the person you’re with, but your mind is often elsewhere… worrying about tasks, perhaps, or planning strategies for the next few months. You might be too exhausted at the end of the day for intimacy. I’m fortunate enough to have a relationship that is mutually supportive… we’re both entrepreneurs. However… I’m not going to lie, the fact our schedules conflict can annoy me.

If you’re looking for someone special, you might have a harder time of it. Dating requires attention: attention to the other person and learning about them, attention to yourself and making yourself feel confident and attractive, etc. Chances are, your business requires more attention than the stranger you met off okCupid.com. I also have a sneaking suspicion that many potential mates will find your ambition intimidating, especially if you’re female.

Friendships: You can’t pull that late night getting a project ready for a client and go out to the pub. You might think you can do both, but you can’t. There are only so many hours in one day. So you turn down invitation after invitation, explaining you have work to do, and your friends are confused because it’s after working hours. Here’s the thing: they’re not going to understand. They may accept your reason, but they’re not going to really get why it’s important that you work on Saturday night. It’s useless to try to make them understand, because they haven’t been there. But, they’re your friends and they’ll understand that you’ll have time to hang out later.

Money and Finances: As far as the bank is concerned, self-employed means unemployed. Unless you have a stellar credit rating and a great relationship with your bank, chances are they’re going to be a jerk about lending you money for anything personal. My long-time big bank refused me a $500 limit credit card once, with the reminder that I can always re-apply if “I get a full-time job”. (I switched to a credit union instead.)

Now, there’s really a few ways to finance your small business… you can take out some small personal loans and grow as you can afford to, work from home for the first while, and hope you break even and don’t need to get a “real job”. That’s rather what the Pixel Foundry is doing. You can also seek investments or business loans. If your small business requires a lot of money to start up, you might have to do this. Regardless of how you fund your business, you’re not going to be writing any cheques to yourself for a long, long time. (Well, okay, you can always take your investment money and splurge on Herman Miller office furniture, fabulous salaries, and foosball tables with it… you can also be out of business within the first two years, like every other tech startup that does that.) Prepare to eat a lot of ramen and borrow money from friends to cover your rent shortfalls.

Housework: If you ended up getting an office, you might end up feeling like you live there, not home. I probably have the last apartment in Vancouver (other than my boyfriend’s) without a dishwasher. When I come home after a 12 hour workday, the last thing I want to do is the pile of evil-looking dishes in the sink. So it gets bigger, and eviller. Entrepreneurs should only have a needy pet (e.g. dog) if they work from home or can bring puppy with them to work. (Note: cats are pretty low maintenance, just don’t forget to feed them.) You can’t run the vacuum in a rental apartment at 1:00 am (unless you’re 207 down the hall from me, in which case you’re a jerk.) So mess piles up, and can feel overwhelming and stressful. My advice: try bribing a family member or friend with baked goods to get them to help out.

Your hobbies: Forget it. Pick them back up in a year or two.

I hope I haven’t talked you out of entrepreneurship. These sacrifices aren’t much different from ones I made to attend college, so I know I can do it… and if you went through college/university, you can do this too. University just has more beer involved.

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Real Reasons to Boycott GoDaddy

Posted on April 2nd, 2011 by emdash in Opinion, Reviews

You shouldn’t switch from GoDaddy because of this!!

Here’s why you should switch from GoDaddy as a hosting/domain provider:

1) They hijack domains. If you type an internet address into GoDaddy to make sure it’s available, their agents will snap it up and charge you extra to “unlock” it.

2) Their control panel sucks. It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but they lack the standard Apache file permissions system. I know your eyes are glazing over right now, so I’ll make it simple: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal -based websites on GoDaddy ARE HELL to set up. If you ever want to consider a content-managed website, where you can update it yourself, you should also consider a new domain registrar and host.

3) They charge extra for services that are considered standard. Every web host offers X amount of email addresses, right?? Wrong. It’s another charge with GoDaddy, for something you can get for free with other shared hosting companies.

4) They fail to actually set up basic hosting packages for their clients. If you buy a domain/hosting package through GoDaddy, they won’t repoint your domain DNS automatically the way every other hosting company since 2005 does. In human speak: your site don’t do nuttin until you phone them or consult their buried Knowledge Base ™ to find out how to do this yourself. How obscure to the average web user is DNS? I’m still figuring out what the frak it is. I only just figured out how to make subdomains point to another host completely. This is geek territory, folks, which is why most webhosts pay geeks $20/hr to do this crap for you.

Okay, if you’re still not sold, I guess you can still be upset at the fact their CEO shot an endangered species and made a publicity video out of it.

If you have horror stories to tell about GoDaddy hosting or domain services, please share them in the comments.

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Lessons in Startup: Is Entrepreneurship a Good Fit for You?

Posted on March 18th, 2011 by emdash in Lessons in Startup, Opinion, Pixel Foundry

A few weeks ago, Kelly and I were asked to talk to the third year IDEA class at Capilano University about starting up Chestnut St. Pixel Foundry. Talking to young, un-jaded design students about their future is a really rewarding experience… getting their fresh perspective on what we were doing helped remind us why we started up in the first place. :)

The presentation we’ve put together has a lot of valuable information and fodder for Lessons in Startup posts, including a slide about the sort of person for whom entrepreneurship is a good fit.

Our talking points:

It’s easier to start a small studio if you are young with fewer responsibilities. During your startup, you can’t expect to make money for a while. Banks don’t care that you have a dry period while building up your clientele, they still want you to pay for your mortgage, car lease payments, etc. If you’re just starting out your adult life and you don’t have these financial worries, it’s less stressful to start up a small business. A lot of people believe one should get their life established before embarking on a business endeavour… I feel the responsibilities of family, home, car and insurance payments, etc, actually make it harder on both you and loved ones.

It’s easier to start a small studio if you have some money saved up. A lot of small businesses fail within the first couple of years. It’s also usual to expect to not make money in the first year or two. While I advise against having a parachute (I still believe it makes an entrepreneur lazy!) it’s good to have some savings to live off, or a backup plan for life expenses. Can you afford to live without income for a year? Can you move back in with your parents, perhaps, or take out a line of credit, or reduce your spending to a point where you don’t need a regular paycheque?

It’s easier to start a small studio if you continue to have part time work to pay bills. If you don’t have savings (I certainly didn’t, my student loan payments made sure of that!) you should consider keeping a part time job that covers your bare minimums. In my case, I work one day a week as a marketer/direct mail designer/web developer/admin at a small seminar business. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to choose my schedule there, keeping things flexible for my studio work and clients. This job ensures I have some income during dry studio periods.

It’s easier to start a small studio if you already have freelance clients. While your costs might be higher as a studio due to your overhead, many of your existing clients might be convinced to work with your new team. After all, you can now offer more expertise and faster turnaround. Even if they’d prefer to still work with you alone, they might refer you to others looking for a design team for their company.

It’s easier to start a small studio if you have an independent mindset and prefer working without constraints/management. I will be the first to admit I don’t work well within office politics. My work mindset is to get things done efficiently… I don’t really tolerate bureaucracy or suffer egos (hopefully I have enough tact that I don’t step on too many toes!) Because of this, I thrive in a small business environment, but get resentful when working with larger groups. An entrepreneur has to be able to problem-solve and survive in business, whether on their own or in a small team. You can’t look to others for leadership; you are the leader! (Some people are happy to have others tell them what to do and are able to leave their work behind at the end of the day. These people may be great employees, but they probably shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.)

My advice to someone considering a small design-related business? Start now. It’s scary at first, but once you dive into a startup, you discover that everything is far easier than you thought possible. The biggest regret I’ve heard talking to other entrepreneurs is “I wish I started sooner.”

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Understanding WordPress.

Posted on March 4th, 2011 by emdash in Opinion, Work

WordPress is the easiest-to-use, most flexible CMS-type package I have ever worked with. It’s a great way for a novice developer to learn more about working with PHP, mySQL and open-source content management. The documentation is in-depth. It’s insanely easy to theme. It’s very easy to write plugins for. However, it’s also very easy to get overconfident with WordPress. I’ve noticed a frightening trend: lazy, inexperienced web developers are charging big bucks for a WordPress installation and “custom” design that’s really just a downloaded theme.

Why does this worry me? Because these designers and developers are ripping off their clients. A WordPress installation on shared hosting (e.g. Varial Technologies) takes less than 5 minutes and little to no experience. Some web hosts will even install it for you at the press of a button. Installing a decent WordPress theme? Another five minutes. These themes are usually flexible enough that you can change the colour scheme, logo, and even number of columns without ever diving into the theme files themselves. Now, if you’re not very computer savvy, it might be worthwhile hiring a web developer to handle all this stuff for you. But if they are charging you thousands of dollars for less than an hour’s work, my heart goes out to you… you’ve been ripped off.

So what is it we do with WordPress at the Foundry, and why are we different? We design the site first on paper. We develop the look and feel, from scratch. We install WordPress (as one would expect), hacking existing plugins as necessary, to make the site function as it needs to. Lastly, we don’t start with any WordPress theme aside from the default twentyten. Everything in our theme is coded by us, to match the site’s visual design that we showed the client. We don’t use WordPress as a plug-and-play solution for our projects… we use it as a base to built a great site upon.

WordPress isn’t good for everything, either. It’s really a solution for someone who wants a site with an active blog and some social media feeding into it. It’s not for e-commerce (learned that one the hard way!), it’s not for anything with user registration or social profiles, it’s not for forums (bbPress is dead), it’s not even very good as a CMS in-and-of itself. It’s extremely slow when you have thousands of hits per day. Many of its plugins are poorly written. Etc. (That said, for a lot of our clients’ websites, WordPress is a good solution, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can work quickly in it because I understand its quirks and possibilities.)

When considering hiring a designer for your new WordPress-based website, work closely with them to truly get your money’s worth. A good WordPress developer will make your site happen, the way you want it. They won’t throw some files on your server, take the money, and run.

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No more IE6.

Posted on December 19th, 2010 by emdash in Opinion, Tutorials

For the last few web development projects I have worked on, I have become fed up with supporting Internet Explorer 6. Sometimes I start off with good intentions and attempt to make my layout work in that horrid excuse of a web browser, but after hours of frustration, decide it isn’t worth the effort – or my clients’ time and money.

Most popular, new-ish websites have limited functionality in IE6. Internet Explorer 6 is now over 6 years old; its last upgrade was in 2004 (source). Google, Facebook and Youtube have all announced they will stop supporting IE6.

Internet Explorer 6 is obsolete. It is okay to have a website that doesn’t support it.

Internet Explorer 6 is full of security holes and improper support for web standards – this is why web developers hate it. Unfortunately, people are inherently lazy with updating their computer’s software, and many non-internet-savvy people are still using the thing. You’ve gotta do something for these poor sods, even though they’re likely not your target market. (Such people tend to distrust shopping online, for example, and won’t shop from an e-commerce website.)

(Note: there’s also people on Windows 2000 at work – these unfortunate souls are forced to use Internet Explorer 6. Again, they’re probably not sticking their credit card number on a webpage at work. Since they soon can’t view YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Google in the office, they’ll probably either look for a new job or we’ll see a mass productivity increase.)

So, what’s the solution for the 5% of the internet’s users, that clings to IE6 like a barnacle to a sinking ship? Enter conditional comments.

Put this at the top of your webpage after the <body> tag:

<!–[if lte IE 6]>
<div id=”IE6warning”>
<p style=”font-size: 13px”><strong>We’ve noticed you appear to be using an older version of Internet Explorer.<br /> To properly view this and other websites, we recommend you <a href=”http://www.ie8optimized.com/” target=”_blank”>update your web browser now</a>.</strong></p>
</div>
<![endif]–>

and style your IE6warning box using CSS to make it pretty. If you want to be sneaky about it, you can make it look like a browser warning along the top of the page.

If the user is running IE6 or (God forbid) IE5.5, they’ll see the warning. Other browsers treat the section like a comment and ignore the enclosed HTML.

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Working for free: just say NO.

Posted on December 8th, 2010 by emdash in Opinion, Work

www.no-spec.com covers working for free better and more extensively than I can, but this is a subject I do feel strongly about.

Graphic design is a difficult market indeed for small businesses and freelancers. We have to compete with countless uneducated “designers” who consider their work a hobby and undercharge, either because it’s not their main career, or they don’t know any better. We also have to compete with poor-quality, quick turnaround “design services” at copy centres, web hosts, etc. There are also offshore “studios” that undercharge.

Part of the issue arises from the belief that all it takes is software (and the knowledge to use it) to make a graphic designer. If this were actually true, I could hold a hammer and claim to be a knowledgeable carpenter. In my opinion, clients who entrust someone with something as important as developing their business’s image through branding, web design, and more, have the right to expect and demand a designer who goes beyond a software technician.

To hire a professional designer who can truly enhance your business and improve its communication requires paying professional rates. Period. If you’re a small, startup business, and wish to hire a designer for your branding, website, or advertising, you shouldn’t have a budget of $0 to pay them.

On the flip side of the coin, eager young designers shouldn’t be accepting free work for the sake of keeping busy. I gained experience and skill while in school by doing freelance work – while my classmates continued to work as restaurant servers and baristas, I took on design jobs to flesh out my portfolio and create contacts. (I highly recommend this.) I took on paid jobs only – as a student, you wouldn’t charge professional rates, but your time is still valuable!

It’s easy enough, as a designer, to not apply for design jobs that won’t compensate you for your time and expertise, but how should you turn down a case where the client contacts you expecting you to work for free?

My usual tactic is to explain politely: “I’m afraid I can’t work for free for any design project unless it’s for a registered charity – it’s simply not fair to my paying clients to do otherwise. If you have a registered charity number, I’ll be happy to reconsider your project. If you have a tight budget for your business, I’d be happy to work out a payment schedule that works for you. Many of my clients have received a monthly invoice to pay for their design work by installments.  This might be a solution for you.”

I usually don’t respond to the hook that the project would be “exposure” or “good for my portfolio” – I have worked for major companies around the Lower Mainland, B.C., Canada, and North America, so I don’t know that my studio would gain from including work from a company that doesn’t even have budget to pay a designer, let alone market itself properly.

As for portfolio work? If you need to flesh out your portfolio as a designer, create your own project. You’ll answer to no one for the design so you can truly make it good – without degrading the professional industry you’re part of.

Do you have any tips for politely turning down spec/unpaid work? Post them in the comments below!

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