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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

by 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…

by hbosch 10y ago

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…