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A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
- lachyg 16y agoThat's disgraceful... I don't know what else to say.
- astrodust 16y agoIf you've never done work on a government contract you can imagine how this simple favicon might've gone through fifty revisions. On highly technical projects people with no technical skill tend to latch on to the little things they do understand and want to meddle with them endlessly. This is the "Bike Shed Principle" or Parkinson's Law of Triviality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality)
- nickbarnwell 16y agoFor those who have too little time to bother with broken links, the article is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
- razzaj 16y agoDude... where i am from... you ask such a question to the government they will laugh to your face ! should you insist security is called... If you come back you will be thrown in jail... On another note... a FAVICON generator website business startup anyone (of course based out of the UK)? lol
- bad_user 16y agobased out of the UK Why? The seem willing to pay for favicons :) favicon generation: £0 installation: £200 1-year email support: £200 -------------------------- TOTAL (*): £400 Savings (*): £185 * VAT not included
- razzaj 16y agoYeah that is what i meant. Not "based outside of" ... well i think it is bad english anyway my fault, i meant "based in the UK".
- corin_ 16y ago"I can advised [sic] you that the work needed to put the favicon live was complicated by an old environment (which has since been updated) that caused issues and extended the time taken to carry out the work." What?
- astrodust 16y agoMaybe this is a euphemism for "bunch of old people who don't know how the internet works but were put on the web site steering committee anyway and made a bunch of of absurd requests that had to be fulfilled in order to get approval".
- bad_user 16y agoYou missed the clarification: I can confirm that that the old website development environment was upgraded from one server to two.
- corin_ 16y agoHow does that have any impact on the cost of a favicon? Unless they were charged per FTP transfer...
- bad_user 16y agoWell yes, that and the original maintenance cost doubled. PS: if you pay attention, right now I am laughing really, really loud, so you might hear me.
- Groxx 16y agoI wonder if they were the ones who set the favicon up so it worked on their server. If that's the case, diving around someone else's code for £585 is pretty cheap.
- bad_user 16y agoBehold, the magic of Apache (or pretty much any web server) ... Alias favicon.ico /path/to/your/physical/location/favicon.ico Now please give £300 for selling you this tip.
- paulirish 16y agoFantastical coincidence: the most expensive favicon.ico was charged to an organization whose branding is a lowercase 'ico'
- jasondavies 16y agoSomewhat ironic that the favicon was for an organisation called ICO.
- Silhouette 16y agoAlso ironic that if you hover over it in Firefox, it says "This web site does not supply identity information." :-) (The ICO is the UK government body responsible for, among other things, regulating the processing and disclosure of personal data.)
- m0th87 16y ago£0.57 ($0.92) per pixel (it was 32x32 :)
- jasondavies 16y agoIt would have only cost £146.25 if they had gone for 16x16 :)
- oops 16y agoMaybe it includes a listing on http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com ?
- electrichead 16y agoYou know, making an effective favicon probably would take a lot of time. There is just not enough room. I would say it is akin to shoving a complex program into a handful of bytes. That being said, this particular favicon was not so much designed as resized, and so I totally agree that they got ripped off!
- burgerbrain 16y ago£1 for the new favicon, £584 for knowing how to do it.
- derleth 16y ago£1 for the new favicon, £1 for knowing how to do it, £583 for knowing my client will actually pay that much.
- Natsu 16y ago> £584 for knowing how to do it. 1) Draw crappy icon in any of the zillion free icon editors out there (e.g. IconEdit32). 2) Name the file 'favicon.ico' and upload it to the root directory of the website. I have a feeling I should be doing consulting in the UK or something.
- burgerbrain 16y agoKnowing how to do it naturally includes "knowing how to land the job". Not as easy as it sounds.
- Natsu 16y agoI recognize that there can be a lot of government hoops to jump through that can legitimately make it expensive to do business with them, but I don't see why the government had to outsource that to begin with. I say that because I remember it taking me only a few minutes to go from knowing nothing whatsoever about them to making my own.
- RaRic 16y agoI need a favicon. Will you do it for ten bucks?
- Natsu 16y agoI'd be happy to help you for free. My email is in my HN profile.
- 16y ago
- pclark 16y agoI think this is the company: http://www.readingroom.com http://www.readingroom.com
- larrik 16y ago1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately) 2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that. 3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual designer. It's easy to say "I could do that in 5 minutes." (cite: from the email exchange) But, could you? Including the design? And making sure after you shrunk it down it still looked okay? There's a good chance you'll need to go in there and draw each pixel by hand to make it look right (and it better be right). Favicons are important, it's a mistake to believe they are always a 5 minute project. (edited to add "always" to the last sentence)
- spxdcz 16y agoTrue, but this DOES look like a five minute project. I just screen-grabbed their large logo, put it into Photoshop, reversed the colors and reduced it to 16x16, and it looks almost exactly the same as their icon - no pixel-pushing required. Sure, the colors aren't perfect, but any semi-decent graphic designer could produce that favicon (from the original logo) in 10 minutes maximum. It's not a complicated face, or anything that uses sub-pixel rendering, or anything like that. EDIT: Here's my 30 second 'inverse and crop' favicon next to their £585 favicon. Not much pixel-pushing going on there... http://fanranked.com/ico_favicon.png http://fanranked.com/ico_favicon.png
- rwhitman 16y agoAgreed, its not like the designer was doing some sort of high-detail pixel art or anything. Favicons can take a really long time. They are an art. However, this one is not even that good of a job. Its a little off center, the font isn't very clear, hard to read. Clearly just a photoshop resize job. I would expect much cleaner work for that price
- mc32 16y agoIs it possible the £585 is a standard fee regardless of simplicity or complexity? i.e. oil change, $40. (no matter it's an easy access filter or complicated filter change)
- ebaysucks 16y agoIf upgrading to a two server environment causes the price of a favicon to balloon to $585, web designers are going to make millions when the government starts hosting in the cloud.
- danielharan 16y agos/\$/£/
- scsmith 16y agoI'd like to know what the cost of getting this response was, sure the icon's expensive but at that rate it probably cost another couple of hundred to give all this information (I know it's internal and not a contractor but someone has to do it).
- lukosan78 16y agoSome factors to bear in mind before balking: 1) The work was done under a support contract, therefore it was probably billed on time and materials and there may also be a minimum or call-out charge (it's the goal of a lot of companies to be able to charge a daily-rate instead of an hourly one). When they say it's not quoted for separately they mean that they didn't put out an RFP, tender it and agree a fixed price beforehand, they asked Reading Room to do the work under an existing contractual agreement at pre-agreed rates. 2) If the work is of a high priority then the hourly cost is greater. 3) It's a government site therefore they probably have a change management process in place which would mean that before anything touches a production server it has to be signed off. If they do things properly (which I honestly don't believe for a second) then there's no way in the world a developer or designer would be able to touch a production server (let alone two) and this would be someone else's job. 4) the design process may have not been as straightforward as just reducing the size. Perhaps they wanted to try it different colours, etc. ? All we can see is the end result and not the process. Of course, they may have just been ripped off. But then so have we by making pointless requests under the Freedom of Information Act which isn't going to accomplish anything more than an inflated sense of our own self-worth.
- kpeel 16y agoAm I the only one impressed with the speed and (relatively) decent and detailed response by the government in this case?
- rwhitman 16y agoThe fact that they were ready to supply an honest answer to the inquiry is pretty cool. Regardless of how steep the cost of that favicon was, I'm impressed by how they can be held accountable for it
- singular 16y agoI spent a long time trying to get mine right, and it's still looks a bit shabby in my mind - http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/ http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/ - I'm not actually that surprised by the cost. This seems to me to be classic non-tech manager thinking - 'how on earth can a 16x16 icon cost that much?!' - but once you factor in all the various factors it's not so obvious. Just because the instinctive reaction is 'that's ridiculous!' it doesn't mean that should override an actual analysis of what might actually be involved.
- csomar 16y agoIf it's for the creation of a new favicon, so that's actually low. Let say, 3 designer hold a discussion together to exchange ideas and mock-ups. They'll need to know what the website is about, what is its' logo, what should the favicon include... If it takes 3 hours, that's 3 x 3 = 9. Then a designer will need to draw the real favicon from that mock-up, don't forget that he'll need to make many resolutions and then tests them. Let say that take 2 hours, including a final discussion with the other members of the team. So in total we have 11 hours, if you consider $150/hour a good rate for a professional, then you'll have $1,650.
- lwhi 16y agoMy guess is that someone who isn't knowledgeable about web development drew up this list of costs. Perhaps they transposed a list of requirements / features and assigned the breakdown incorrectly - assigning too much cost/time emphasis to favicon design.
- rriepe 16y agoIf you factor in the time for bothersome, inane e-mails, then their 585 figure makes more sense.
- alexqgb 16y agoThat's actually not a joke. There is probably a whole layer of internal costs for every government agency involved, maintaining the paper trails that allow these questions to be answered in the first place. There's a near-zero probability that these laws (yes, laws) don't have some impact on the job-management process, which will carry into procedural burdens for vendor to factor into their quoted prices.
- noginn 16y ago"the work needed to put the favicon live was complicated by an old environment (which has since been updated) that caused issues and extended the time taken to carry out the work." Sounds like their old CMS system made it difficult to actually add a favicon in the template. I very much doubt the quoted price is just for creating the icon.
- JonnieCache 16y agoThis is why the UK is so broke. Corrupt government procurement procedures. Departments overpay like this for various reasons, having to spend the whole budget is a good one. The UK is very corrupt, but our establishment is very good at hiding it and making it all legitimate. Look up some data about Private Finance Initiatives if you want to be really shocked, a £550 favicon is nothing compared to the billions that have been taken from us. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/24/pfi-nhs http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/24/pfi-nhs In many of these cases, the procurement procedure is ITSELF contracted out to a third company that will charge a "procurement fee" as a percentage of the value of the final contract. Obviously this incentivises them to pick the most expensive supplier. I'm trying to find a source but coming up short, google gives me pages and pages of worthless drek from the government websites themselves. I'll try to edit in a link later.
- Tichy 16y agoI think another government (France?) paid several million EUR for a jingle for the World Exhibition. It was made by the band Kraftwerk, but still.
- arnorhs 16y agoI've seen much worse. One being a client billed 7 hours x roughly $150 for... wait for it... modifying a dns entry... This is not a joke, and it was a pretty sizable dev shop here in iceland
- axod 16y agoThe irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost, likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out. Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than was paid out originally in expenses. £585 is nothing in that sort of context.
- corin_ 16y agoAssuming you are employing hyperbole I'll skip over the idea of it costing more than £585 in their time to find out. As to the MPs' expenses stuff, I don't know the figures of how much the inquiry cost, but assuming you're right that it cost more, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it. For one reason, ethics - should police ignore crimes when it appears that the damage caused by the criminal is less than it would cost the police force to pursue it? For another, the future - If you cut off the problem then it doesn't keep costing money year after year, which would add up to costing more than the inquiry did.
- axod 16y agoI'm not in the least... It probably took them an hour to find out, reply to the emails etc. They probably had to ask others etc. Their salary, electricity, office overhead etc. I'd expect it came to a fair bit more than £585 to deal with the request for information. The MP expenses thing was always ridiculous. So an MPs husband mistakenly put in an expense claim for £10 adult movie. Sure it sells papers, but £10 is nothing. We spend more on paper cups in a single room of the NHS. The rules were ridiculously open to interpretation - second homes etc. Couple that with the fact that MPs get paid next to nothing, and it's no wonder they try to claim expenses for everything. The answer is to pay MPs more - the going rate for if they're in the business world. If you don't want corruption or taking liberties, you must start by paying a fair wage.
- notahacker 16y agoI agree that MPs are relatively underpaid [1] and mistaken adult movie claims are a cause for embarrassment rather than the source of the national debt. But I don't think it's ridiculous to prosecute MPs who defraud the public by claiming "homes" belonging to other people that they've never even stayed in; even though the prosecution costs far more than the actual offence. Lines have to be drawn. It's expensive to prosecute people for shoplifting too. [1]underpaid enough to be justifiably anal about claiming expenses; not so underpaid that doubling their income by home flipping is the only way they can feed their families
- VladRussian 16y agocommon guys! the 53 miles of US border fence cost 1B. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41083850/ns/us_news-security/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41083850/ns/us_news-security/ It is about $300/inch. That would be 53 miles of new favicon/inch ($300 vs 585 pounds - thats 70% volume discount given by Boing to teh US government). Look at the picture at the link above - it is a really hi-tech fence.
- radley 16y agoclient -> agency client rep -> in-agency meeting -> agency talent rep -> studio(s) -> studio rep -> studio art director -> studio art grunt -> photoshop / favicon.cc
- DrStalker 16y agoI've charegd a client over $1000 for a one-line script that used SCP to copy a file from one place to another. I even told them upfront it would be a trivial one-line script, and made no pretense it was not a really simple thing to do. But by the time you cover quoting, invoicing, documentation for the change control process and arranging the required access there is a whole days effort spent on the task. Just because something is easy to do in an environment where you have complete control and no need to justify and document changes doesn't mean it's easy to do in a production environment, and that's assuming the icon itself wasn't properly hand-crafted pixel by pixel to get the best result.
- javanix 16y agoAt my current salary, it would take me about 10 days of work to reach £585 in straight labor costs. Honestly, that doesn't seem to be too overly ridiculous to me. There is a lot of work that goes into designing them (and installing them into each page of a website, especially if the favicon was new and not an update). If the company in question didn't have someone perfectly familiar with the site in question, I can see it taking a week or so to get it out the door. What costs would be added by going through the process of taking bids? I wouldn't be surprised if those in themselves ran to £100 - £200.
- ethan 16y agofavicon was not quoted separately, wasn't 585 pounds, non-story
- switch007 16y agoI don't know whether I'm disgusted or full of glee that my company is working hard on government tenders.
- linker3000 16y agoScary thing is I encountered a similar 'issue': The quote was to modify a piece of linux-based kit to work with a regular screen and keyboard instead of a touchscreen. The cost? £3300 for 'development'. I was asked to grab a piece of sample kit and liaise with the development company to have the work done. To cut a long story short, one of the developers called me back a day or so later and gave me instructions on how to change one line in an XML file from TOUCHSCREEN=YES to NO. After I had completed the work, I reported back to the man in charge of the project and queried the cost. He said that since it was being passed to the customer it was not an issue.
- gte910h 16y agoIt only cost 585 pounds to add a favicon to a government website? I'm surprised it wasn't more. Working wit the government is not cheap. It is not easy. It is not something that lends itself to lean development shops. That development work is supporting a bevy of sales and process people to deal with government stuff. 585 pounds is cheap
- tomelders 16y agoSo is this guy trying to make the point that "design is worthless"?
- dolphenstein 16y ago<sarcasm>Great point! The government should source all their development work from craigslist from now on!</sarcasm>
- michaelpinto 16y agoIf you are retouching a favicon pixel-by-pixel I can see that racking up a few hours: £585 = $944, so if a designer is say charging $150 to work on a complex logo that would quickly add up. It's actually much harder to create something good in the space of just a few pixels as opposed to a social media icon which might give you 100 pixels. By the way I noticed yesterday that Hacker news is going to start a designer's directory because there "are so few good designers". I submit the problem really is that there are so few programmers who can be bothered to learn anything about designers or how they work. In fact the very notion that designers are some secondary set of dumb hands is quite insulting. The reality is that product design (of any sort) should START with a designer and not an engineer. VCs should give more serious thought that an BFA or MFA is worth far more than a CS or MBA.
- famfamfam 16y agoYou could assume that the time allocations could be broken down as follows (billable by the hour), which makes it more believable that the total cost could be approx £585. * 1 hour - Account handler discusses with request with client, adds to studio traffic scheduler * 2 hours - Icon development by designer * 3 hours - Developer wrestles with old website platform to try and add relevant <link> to every template * 1 hour - Project Manager reviews and discusses with client * 1 hour - Developer deploys to production environment Making 8 hours at approx £75/h (£600) which all sounds perfectly believable for a London digital studio. One of the issues with the low barrier to entry to web development is that a class of people exist who believe that the job is entirely a process of making a website (or a favicon) and uploading it via FTP, maybe even installing Wordpress. Complex client relationships, business/deployment processes and old web systems do not factor into their equation for cost. It is important that these people exist, otherwise the cost of being involved with the web would be astronomical for businesses at the lower end, but there _are_ good industry practices for quality work and jobs required at the higher end which they are putting in jeopardy with sensationalist headlines such as this one. Some clients have more available money, but require much more effort than throwing up a few plugins and shooting them an email once it is done. Nor is favicon design a case of taking one of my Silk icons are throwing it through a dynamicdrive favicon maker. That said, there are still a few examples of UK website procurement which goes beyond what you might call value for money, such as Birmingham Council's website which cost £3m (http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-to-2-8m-65233-24307674/ http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/...), although my concern with that website was not so much the cost but the quality of the work (from a quick scan I don't have the same concerns about the ICO website).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]