I Decide What I’m Worth!
Few days back, when I mailed to my contacts about my Design Studio, I received a reply from one of my friends asking me for designing a logo of his name. I replied that it would cost him certain amount. I know he was kidding as I knew his nature. He didn’t reply to my mail. Recently, one of my acquaintances, commented on my blog to design a logo of his name. Again, I sent him a mail explaining the viability of personal branding and the amount that it may cost him. He retorted in his reply mail saying that he’s feeling great that I’m doing business even with classmates in school. Now, should I be feeling guilty for this? I guess no! And I justified myself in my reply mail saying…
The way I perceive Logo Design and the way you do seem to be conflicting here. When a logo is designed, the purpose, the necessity, the personality, the character, the qualities etc of a company/ individual are taken into consideration. Right from the rough draft to the final design, it takes approximately 20-30 hours of work. And if the client’s inputs are considered which puts me again onto modifying or redesigning the whole logo, the working hours may increase to 40 hours (approx.). And to imbibe all the qualities into such a small graphic that becomes your visual identity is not a small task. Apart from this, I have college assignments and personal projects to attend to. It’s not like I have a rough idea and I scribble it and boom! - a logo is done! Lot of work goes into a single design.
Sometimes, I feel a little bit lazy to work on the undertaken assignments. So, there should be a driving factor. And that’s where money comes in. The client has paid me money and I need to work for him/her. If that driving factor isn’t there, I may keep dragging the work for a long time and eventually stop doing it.
I call this professionalism rather than business. Several of my friends would like their own logos to be done by me for free, given a chance. What do you think they would do with that logo? They look at it for few minutes. Feel good about it and leave it. So, the work I did for 20-40 hrs is just for preening at it and feeling good about themselves? Then, where do you think the respect that design deserves would be? Everyone will feel that it’s so easy that he does it for free! Already India is facing a slump as far as design is concerned. I would never accelerate that putting my hard work at stake.
Certainly, I would design for free. But that would be for social organizations. They work for the society and they could use my service for free. That’s called Pro Bono/Gratis work. If Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were classmates, would Microsoft develop MacOffice for Apple for free? No. Right? This is just a similar case.
And my words in my reply above are underlined by this very good article at alphablogdesigns. I got to read this post today and even without my knowledge, I’m getting good at freelancing. I’m quoting the best lines from that blog post.
When thinking about your products or services, you have to determine the ‘worth’, in order to reflect an accurate ‘value’.
I’d like to buy myself the Adobe suite, MacBook, a digital SLR, a Wacom Intuos or Cintiq, and more. Where do I get the bucks from if I use my resources and hard work to create logos for free?
When you get a reputation among customers for being cheap, such an image may immediately drive away other possible clientele.
The image you’re creating today, is developing and contributing to your future image.
And like I said about respect, here the author of the article goes!
Designers are very conscious of the need to educate the public, that design isn’t just someone with the ability to use Photoshop.
So going down this road, just to let you know, may create a few enemies.
And finally,
At the end of the day, when it comes to pricing, the buck stops with you. You are the one who’s going to have to decide what you’re worth.
If he gets my point, then I’ll be happy. If he doesn’t, I’ll have to agree with the author when he says “we may create few enemies down the road!”
hello dude,
looking at what you have written in this post has really made my mind to be busy for sometime.
“Sharing knowledge”. I was worrying, If every one who has contributed to “open source”would have thought as you, there would have been no Linux. Even the giants like Mac and Microsoft have followed many design implementations of open source. Have all those ppl felt bad about what they are worth for. They have created the future for free. It is not for the money they working for. It is the reputation they get from what they do. Money would definitely come to those who has the ability to create the future. I believe you are one of them. I really feel that there is no point in thinking about the money at this point in time. Do the work and if people really love your work they will donate. There are many websites I have seen where people do good work and ask for donations. It is the publicity they really care about.
Thanks,
I sense a little digression in your comment. The example of Linux that you quoted comes under the Pro Bono/ Gratis work that I talked about in my reply. Think this way! Leave your job and start coding for Linux. And then! Where would you get the money to buy your workstation and other resources? It’s in the free time (i.e., if you’re not busy with your project concerning your job) that you develop for Linux. Right? So, how do you support your basic needs? You need money! So, let’s suppose you don’t care about money. After working for long hours, someone will say “sheesh! It’s a very good program that you’ve coded but I just asked you to do it for fun. It’s of no use to me.” Good! There goes your hard work.. into gutter!
I’d have been very happy to create a logo for free for the person if he had a purpose. If creating Linux hadn’t served the purpose of an alternative OS to Windows, why would the creator even take the pain of creating it? Currently, I’m designing for startups at a reduced market rate. I even sent a proposal to a Non-Profit organization to do a free logo design. And as you see, the subsequent post to this is an example of sharing my knowledge for free.
Linus Torvalds worked as a software engineer at chip-maker Transmeta Corp. Without that to support him, it’d have been difficult for him. Even Wikipedia says ‘Torvalds developed the Linux kernel as a hobby OS’.
Mozilla, being an open source foundation, receives royalty from big companies like Google. After the advent of BPO’s, there’s less left for freelancing for programmers. In a way, you too are freelancing through your company. Would you consider doing it for free? And why do you gripe if your company pays you less? Why don’t you share your knowledge with the company? The only difference here is that I, myself, am the company! From PR to the design work, everything is done by me!
Donations? You’ve got a wrong idea about designers. It’s just as respectable a profession as you’re in! Most designers get lump sum amounts for their work. What you saw may be hobby websites of people looking for alternate money.
Saawan, read your post. Well put I should say. MOney is the driving factor in many of the businesses. And yeah, sharing the knowledge of the greater good (doing work for free!!!) too is important. As you said, it is pure professionalism. Go on on your endeavours dude..
Thanks for the comments, bro! I’ve never been against sharing knowledge as in my comment above, I’ve suggested several works of mine which include this aspect like writing tutorials and doing gratis work.
As the author suggests, designer isn’t just someone with the ability to use Photoshop. I guess we, Indians, have little respect towards design, which really needs to change.
[...] I wrote an article on my blog about doing design for free, one of my friends was talking about donations if we design. I don’t see the people I know [...]