Graphic design in Salisbury for free?
Published on Wednesday, July 16th 2014 by Aaron Whiffin
We read a post the other day asking for graphic designers in Salisbury to create a logo for a company in the hope of winning the tender and getting their work paid for.
On the face of it this may be a reasonable request, but in reality it is hardly ever cost effective for either the graphic designer, or Salisbury’s local economy.
If you are shopping for groceries in a supermarket it would be reasonable to compare items side by side, but this doesn’t necessarily work for all products and services. For example you wouldn’t expect a restaurant to cook a meal for a customer to decide if it’s what they want. So what’s the difference? In this example the groceries are a pre-made product that won’t go to waste, yet the meal in restaurant has been cooked to order and cannot be reused.
Any decent graphic designer would be creating this logo bespoke for their client, and so it could not be reused. However it may be assumed that the graphic designer should consider this a marketing expense… we believe this is still wrong.
- A decent graphic designer wouldn’t be able to create a logo for a client without a meeting to discuss the business and their requirements. They would be taking an educated guess at what they believe the client needs which may not be accurate. This often results in the project being restarted once the tender has been won.
- The logo would be created with a view of selling the graphic designer to the prospective client and not selling the client’s services to their customers.
- Any decent design is likely to be made with the designer collaborating with their client. The designer will have an idea of what will work, but should be asking probing questions about the business and audience.
- The cost of development will need to be recouped by the graphic designer. This is not only for this particular project, but also for all tenders that were unsuccessful. This cost will need to be passed to other clients. It is unfair for a client to pay for work on someone else’s project just because they decided to ask for a speculative design.
This theory is true not only for graphic design, but also for web design and development.
When designing a website, we do not ‘knock up’ a design quickly, but can spend days ensuring that the design is perfectly suited to the client and their customers.
If any prospective client would like to see what we can do for them, they should look at our web design portfolio, look at our testimonials, contact our clients, and meet us for a coffee to discuss how we can help in detail.
Web design and development is not about creating the quickest and cheapest solution, web design is an investment not an expense, and any decent graphic designer or web designer should ideally be spending their time producing high quality work for clients who want a solution that will represent their business.
Webbed Feet UK offer website design and graphic design in Salisbury.