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14 years agodiscuss

I recently worked on a site run on such a server. I've set up my own servers before, and I think it can be fun, but this time it was the other guy's. I have to say it was pretty annoying because the little things that were not set up properly added up to a website that wouldn't deliver email, a shell environment with awful defaults...yuck. There was a lot of maintenance that was ignored because the guy just didn't have the time. Well, that's what commercial web hosts are for. It's amusing to think that some overburdened IT guys believe they're doing their clients a huge favor by running a vanilla web server in their network closet.

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14 years agodiscuss

>generate web sites for commercial art galleries (who didn't want web sites).

Were you generating the sites in sort of a 3rd-party, no-connection way, or did they just want someone to create their sites for them?

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14 years agodiscuss

I took E16, newly installed on my laptop, to a work presentation once. I was really excited to turn the thing on and see everyone's eyes bug out. But I plugged the projector in and it turned out there was some strange compatibility problem. One step forward, two back.

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14 years agodiscuss

When you scale it down to letterhead size, it is no longer NEMA 6 compliant. :-(

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14 years agodiscuss

I wasn't sure what the point of the article was. Reinforcing pricing notions of a specific group was my second guess, and from what you're saying, that's the right one.

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14 years agodiscuss

$10000+ is the "domain of big-budget agencies"? What exact kind of work are we talking about here? Certainly not websites...that are any good... :)

Maybe that's the problem I had with this post--no project parameters are visible. Because it's not like you can walk into a big-budget agency and they say, "for $10,000 we can build you either a logo or an app. But not both."

When you walk into a big-budget agency, you will be lucky if you can get penciled onto their calendar in about a month.

When you walk into a small agency, they'll meet with you right there for a few minutes, then probably never call you back because demand is too high and you sound like a cheap client, asking where your $10,000 will get you. Now, for low-end small agencies, the reverse is true. They will never call you back because they can't figure out why someone would pay $10K for design, and it scares them. I have seen that happen.

When you chat up a highly-skilled individual freelancer, he/she will immediately try to figure out which you value more: Good design or budget integrity. High-value freelancers, working as individuals, are known to take on projects of $50K and higher. They have a great reputation and are hired by people who are good delegators with a need to solve a distant problem effectively.

Demand for high-value, professional design services is extremely high. Here at HN the startup culture is always squawking about the cost of design, but the demand really is there. For every "I am willing to pay you $XXXX for a website" phone call I get, I can invent 2-3 opportunities of my own to contact existing clients and sell them on an idea that will cost them $XX,XXX. This is not some secret where I am keeping them from discovering cheap designers. It's how professional design works. I know their business. I pitch an idea that makes them stand out. They go after it.

Anyway, telling people that they can (or should) hire a big-budget agency with their $10K is pretty misleading.

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14 years agodiscuss

Don't forget that Nike's original logo was accepted due to time constraints. The swoosh was combined with an incredibly badly aligned logotype that was altered later before finally arriving at "swoosh only." http://www.logoblog.org/nike_logo.php

Nike has since paid huge amounts of cash to refine and iterate their logo.

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14 years agodiscuss

Sure it is a bit of an overpayment for a cheap logo. Like any bad logo though, it just sits there and waits for refinement. With all of the "X Corp got their now-famous logo" comments, what isn't mentioned is the way the logos evolve over time. The original Nike logo would be a complete embarrassment for a high-value sporting goods brand today: http://www.logoblog.org/nike_logo.php

Guess how much it's cost Nike to hire designers and agencies to refine that logo over the years? Not to mention the various forks for separate marketing projects.

When you pay a designer a lot of money up front for a logo design, you are hopefully paying for a highly-refined solution set to a problem or group of problems. Nike did this as they moved forward from their original logo. They are paying for the "hin" concept (Japanese for refinement). Product designers understand this better than any other group--you have to continuously refine as you go forward, or somebody else will eat your lunch.

Someone who knows their design principles instinctively should be able to take a bad logo and detect the sound principles behind it, filter out the other noise (non-essentials to the problem at hand) and propose appropriate changes.

As the author of the post says over and over, he is paying for something that serves a purpose. He is paying for something that he doesn't know how to create, or even use properly (see website alignment issues). So this situation isn't some grand thumbs-down at the design industry. It's just a set of circumstances that taxes one's thought process a bit too much and usually results in (hopefully temporary) sloppy work.