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Website design By BotEap.comA little knowledge avoids excessive hidden costs.
Website design By BotEap.comJust because a design looks good doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Unfortunately, some graphic artists are oblivious to the hidden costs of their designs and one of three things is at stake in this situation:
Website design By BotEap.comA) or they don’t really know how much their designs will cost you over time,
Website design By BotEap.comB) they really haven’t thought it through,
Website design By BotEap.comC) they mistakenly think that the additional costs are a reflection of their talent (fortunately, this worst-case scenario is a rarity).
Website design By BotEap.comAs a printing professional, I have seen this occur in some cases and it is discouraging, especially when the client is a struggling new business or non-profit organization and an unscrupulous designer violates their trust.
Website design By BotEap.comI remember a private non-profit school that thought they had found the perfect design team out of state to help them “rename” their school. Before the rebranding effort, they had a very professional and recognized brand identity in the upper-class market they served. His new out-of-state design firm thought the school needed a “new edgy look.” However, I doubt that designers would have visited this campus, which had been built on a former farm, where the centerpiece of the campus was a converted 19th century two-story barn and the entire campus looked and felt like an old west. . farm.
Website design By BotEap.comSo the design company created a new edgy and modern logo for the school (which, of course, would require all new signage, new bus advertising, new t-shirts, new marketing materials, new parking passes, new internal documents, and new web work) and made sure the new logo used 5 different Pantone colors, several of which couldn’t easily be converted to process colors without negatively affecting the image.
Website design By BotEap.comYou don’t need to be a printing expert to understand that the more colors you use in a layout, the more expensive each printed document will be to create. When multiple colors are used in a design, or the design involves a photograph, the typical production method is to convert all color to cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K). These are the 4 process colors (commonly referred to as CMYK) and virtually all printed photos, fine art prints, magazines, billboards, and almost all other printed images are created using these colors. Photos are easily converted to CMYK, but Pantone colors are completely different.
Website design By BotEap.comThere are literally thousands of specific colors defined and used in all industries. Paint uses one standard, fabric uses another, the automotive industry has its own specific color set, and the most commonly defined color set used in printing is the Pantone Color Matching System (PMS Colors). Each color set (fabric versus print versus automotive) uses its own pigments, binding agents, stabilizers, drying compounds, and mixing formulas. And for the purposes of this article, suffice it to say that not all Pantone colors convert well to CMYK colors.
Website design By BotEap.comGoing back to our story about the new logo for the school … the new logo used 5 different PMS colors. Printers come in different configurations and the more colors that can be printed at the same time, the more expensive the press is and (as it follows logically) the printed materials produced by the more expensive printers are priced accordingly. Typical printing presses are configured in 2-color, 4-color, 6-color, etc. and the incremental costs between these configurations are not linear but geometric. For example, a 4-color press would probably cost 5 or 6 times more than a 2-color press and an 8-color press would cost 3 to 5 times more than a 4-color press.
Website design By BotEap.comThese are blanket statements, but from a school-related cost standpoint, the new PMS 5-color design dictated that they would need expensive new levels of technical expertise. for all your production work– Large screen printed bus signs, internal forms, t-shirts, parking passes, student ID, newsletters, brochures, marketing literature, letterheads, invoices, checks, envelopes, etc. and the cost of each of these items skyrocketed.
Website design By BotEap.comOf course, not knowing what I just explained about how the new design resulted in complicated new production methods, campus staff were horrified to learn of the additional costs of each item they used in their operation and marketing. Certainly, school officials had budgeted money to hire the professional design company, but they hadn’t budgeted extra money to pay for the new production methods needed to print the new design.
Website design By BotEap.comSince the school had been in operation for decades, they had a clear idea of how much each item in their budget would cost. Unfortunately, that knowledge was based on the old logo, not the new one, and no one on the school’s branding team was smart enough in print to know what impact the design would have on production costs, nor did they ask. any of its affiliated vendors information. in the new design. Many of their print partners heard for months that a new branding effort was underway, but none were consulted until the final design was selected and approved.
Website design By BotEap.comAs you may have guessed, when staff began to realize what the new design would cost their particular departments, they immediately began to compromise that design to stay within their budgets. And what was intended to be a brand for the whole school quickly degraded to fragmented subsets of the new design. One billboard company converted the 5 PMS colors into CMYK screen printing ink, another department asked their printer to convert the logo to shades of gray, another wanted to revert to the original two colors used before the change, and all the benefits. of the new brand were overshadowed by budget constraints.
Website design By BotEap.comDid the graphic design company know the impact their design would have on the overall school budget? I do not know. Did they care? I dont know! If they didn’t know, it’s their fault because that’s their business. If they knew what the hidden costs would be and didn’t mention it, what a shame to put art (form) over utility (function).
Website design By BotEap.comOf course, the ultimate responsibility lay with the school’s new branding team, but their knowledge base was in education, not graphics or print, so the graphic artists should have informed the brand team that the new design could result in additional production costs. With that information, they would have made an informed decision about all the design options.
Website design By BotEap.comWhat can you learn from the school’s mistake? First, suppose that graphic designers are more involved in the art (form) of design than in the use of that design (function). You are responsible for thinking of all the ways the logo is used now, or could be used in the future, and feel free to get outside input from production specialists. You should set limits at the beginning of the interaction and ask the designer for a breakdown of all your costs.
Website design By BotEap.comAs a final example, I worked with a designer who purchased a photograph for our common client. It was an image of a plant that the designer used as background art and it was so light that you could barely see the flower in the finished printed document. He charged the customer $ 1800 for that image he bought from an online photo source. I asked her about the expense and her comment was (and I’m quoting her): “I don’t care. It’s not my money.” I think that attitude may be more prevalent than any of us want to believe, so you need to set some limits and really understand the designer’s pricing structure.
Website design By BotEap.comThe lessons
Website design By BotEap.com1) When hiring a graphic designer, unless the design is used exclusively on the web (where you can use all the colors of the rainbow without affecting the price), keep in mind that the more colors used in the design, the more expensive will be. to print anything that uses that design.
Website design By BotEap.com2) If there are many colors involved, please make sure the colors can be converted to CMYK.
Website design By BotEap.com3) Finally, when you hire a graphic designer, ask him what kind of production experience he has. If you’ve never left behind your computer, I caution you to ask a professional printer for a quick assessment before even signing a preliminary design.
Website design By BotEap.com4) Have a frank conversation with the designer about all the costs of your design process and production costs.
Website design By BotEap.comFinally, keep in mind that in design, even the simplest things can make a big difference in cost. Black on white vs. White on black looks basically the same, right? But having spent more than 25 years in the printing profession, I assure you that those two things are as different as night and day. Request a free design evaluation from a printing professional and avoid hidden costs.
