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One example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black squ

One example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and doesn’t look as good. How is that even possible?

csours 10y ago
I went to a 3,000 man-hour meeting this morning.
kbenson 10y ago
I could see 200 employees with a a single all-hands-on-deck meeting where nobody can keep it together and it's three hours of chaos where nothing gets accomplished, but everyone racks up a free lunch, and then a few smaller meetings over multiple weeks that account for the rest of the time.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dangrossman 10y ago
727 hours is a team of 10 working for less than 2 work weeks. Or a team of 6 having a couple 1-hour meetings with other groups in addition to doing the design work. It'd be hard for any medium to large organization with an internal design team to rebrand without using hundreds of hours of staff time.
- kyleblarson 10y ago
  that said, assuming you are working in the US, are you willing to work an extra few minutes over the course of the next year to generate the tax revenue for this?
  - chris_7 10y ago
    When I work overtime, I don't get paid more...
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    The entire budget of 18F is about 10 cents per taxpayer. 700 staff hours is far below a penny per taxpayer. I'm fine with it. In addition, most 18F employees are salaried, so this is not likely to be an actual cost overrun, but rather an opportunity cost.
- pryelluw 10y ago
  Yes, good point. What I don't get is 727 hours for that specific logo. Either way, it just stood out.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    > What I don't get is 727 hours for that specific logo. It's not 727 hours for the logo. It was that many hours for the entire rebranding effort, including coming up with the brand and implementing it. When coming up with logos and brands, it's often necessary to brainstorm ideas, try many of them out, review them with stakeholders, before finally settling on one vision and then executing it.
jdale27 10y ago
Not sure how it happened at 18F, but in my experience working with "serious" designers, this is not surprising. They will spend weeks interviewing "stakeholders" and customers, iterating on "visual languages" and "brand identity", etc., etc., going through endless tweaks and revisions and feedback sessions before finally settling on something that looks like a totally untrained graphic designer crapped it out in five minutes. (Obviously this doesn't apply to all designers; there are many who are much more pragmatic.) The recent redesign of the University of California logo is a good example of this phenomenon: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-69-the-brief-and-tumultuous-life-of-the-new-uc/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-69-the-brief-a....
hbosch 10y ago
Honestly that's a dumb one to cherry pick, because we only see the end result. If you figure a team of 6, for instance, working 30-40 hrs a week on branding for about a month, the time is easy to figure. What's harder to understand externally is that there may have been 10, 20, or 40 logo designs that get explored, scrapped, edited, changed, saved, reverted... and sure, sometimes you end up pretty close to where you began. But that doesn't mean it was wasted time or effort. Design often gets shit on when all you see is the beginning and end. The value is in the middle, which is done internally.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > The value is in the middle, which is done internally. Wait. Can you back up and explain that? From the way I think about it, design is about producing something in the end. If you can produce the same end product cheaper and or faster, then you are ahead. If I buy two manufactured items bikes that are physically identical, but one company found a way to reduce the work required by 10% to save themselves, money, that doesn't matter to be as the end recipient of that product. If it's identical, it's identical. Now, if you're a design firm, sure, the knowledge gained from the work might yield benefits down the line. But 18F isn't a design firm. A new logo does not help them make better products for the agencies they serve. In what way are they better off by spending that time than if they were able to literally just slap the same end result together in five minutes?
- acdha 10y ago
  This brings back so many memories from working at a design-heavy web consulting shop during the first bubble. We had some of the best designers I've ever worked with, who could meet with the client once and produce multiple great concepts the next day. None of that mattered with some clients: get a room full of VPs, an indecisive founder, etc. and before you know it the endless tweaks and revisions blue well into six figures and start delaying work on everything downstream. Some of that was indecision, poor management, etc. but much of it was simply many stakeholders with different priorities. Get a dozen Sony executives in a room – which was the average meeting – and unsurprisingly it turns out that you have a dozen opinions about what the most important elements of the project are. Someone visiting that website or using a product has absolutely no way to know any of that and sees a design they could do quickly – if they'd only been presented with the end vision of what the project was about…
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Steve Jobs wannabes I guess.
elefanten 10y ago
I think the Washington Post pretty badly mischaracterized the original findings, which were as follows: "18F Branding – Staff spent 727 hours (valued at an estimated $140,104) developing the 18F brand. An example of one of their branding projects is the 18F logo change, seen below in Figure 8. " It was 727 for all branding activities and the logo was just one of them. And that's over a period of almost 2 years. Doesn't strike me as unreasonable, especially in the early stages.

csours 10y ago

I went to a 3,000 man-hour meeting this morning.

kbenson 10y ago

I could see 200 employees with a a single all-hands-on-deck meeting where nobody can keep it together and it's three hours of chaos where nothing gets accomplished, but everyone racks up a free lunch, and then a few smaller meetings over multiple weeks that account for the rest of the time.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dangrossman 10y ago

727 hours is a team of 10 working for less than 2 work weeks. Or a team of 6 having a couple 1-hour meetings with other groups in addition to doing the design work. It'd be hard for any medium to large organization with an internal design team to rebrand without using hundreds of hours of staff time.

kyleblarson 10y ago
that said, assuming you are working in the US, are you willing to work an extra few minutes over the course of the next year to generate the tax revenue for this?
- chris_7 10y ago
  When I work overtime, I don't get paid more...
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  The entire budget of 18F is about 10 cents per taxpayer. 700 staff hours is far below a penny per taxpayer. I'm fine with it. In addition, most 18F employees are salaried, so this is not likely to be an actual cost overrun, but rather an opportunity cost.
pryelluw 10y ago
Yes, good point. What I don't get is 727 hours for that specific logo. Either way, it just stood out.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  > What I don't get is 727 hours for that specific logo. It's not 727 hours for the logo. It was that many hours for the entire rebranding effort, including coming up with the brand and implementing it. When coming up with logos and brands, it's often necessary to brainstorm ideas, try many of them out, review them with stakeholders, before finally settling on one vision and then executing it.

jdale27 10y ago

Not sure how it happened at 18F, but in my experience working with "serious" designers, this is not surprising. They will spend weeks interviewing "stakeholders" and customers, iterating on "visual languages" and "brand identity", etc., etc., going through endless tweaks and revisions and feedback sessions before finally settling on something that looks like a totally untrained graphic designer crapped it out in five minutes. (Obviously this doesn't apply to all designers; there are many who are much more pragmatic.) The recent redesign of the University of California logo is a good example of this phenomenon: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-69-the-brief-and-tumultuous-life-of-the-new-uc/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-69-the-brief-a....

hbosch 10y ago

Honestly that's a dumb one to cherry pick, because we only see the end result. If you figure a team of 6, for instance, working 30-40 hrs a week on branding for about a month, the time is easy to figure. What's harder to understand externally is that there may have been 10, 20, or 40 logo designs that get explored, scrapped, edited, changed, saved, reverted... and sure, sometimes you end up pretty close to where you began. But that doesn't mean it was wasted time or effort. Design often gets shit on when all you see is the beginning and end. The value is in the middle, which is done internally.

kbenson 10y ago
> The value is in the middle, which is done internally. Wait. Can you back up and explain that? From the way I think about it, design is about producing something in the end. If you can produce the same end product cheaper and or faster, then you are ahead. If I buy two manufactured items bikes that are physically identical, but one company found a way to reduce the work required by 10% to save themselves, money, that doesn't matter to be as the end recipient of that product. If it's identical, it's identical. Now, if you're a design firm, sure, the knowledge gained from the work might yield benefits down the line. But 18F isn't a design firm. A new logo does not help them make better products for the agencies they serve. In what way are they better off by spending that time than if they were able to literally just slap the same end result together in five minutes?
acdha 10y ago
This brings back so many memories from working at a design-heavy web consulting shop during the first bubble. We had some of the best designers I've ever worked with, who could meet with the client once and produce multiple great concepts the next day. None of that mattered with some clients: get a room full of VPs, an indecisive founder, etc. and before you know it the endless tweaks and revisions blue well into six figures and start delaying work on everything downstream. Some of that was indecision, poor management, etc. but much of it was simply many stakeholders with different priorities. Get a dozen Sony executives in a room – which was the average meeting – and unsurprisingly it turns out that you have a dozen opinions about what the most important elements of the project are. Someone visiting that website or using a product has absolutely no way to know any of that and sees a design they could do quickly – if they'd only been presented with the end vision of what the project was about…

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Steve Jobs wannabes I guess.

elefanten 10y ago

I think the Washington Post pretty badly mischaracterized the original findings, which were as follows: "18F Branding – Staff spent 727 hours (valued at an estimated $140,104) developing the 18F brand. An example of one of their branding projects is the 18F logo change, seen below in Figure 8. " It was 727 for all branding activities and the logo was just one of them. And that's over a period of almost 2 years. Doesn't strike me as unreasonable, especially in the early stages.