Self justification of costings for logos...

Si and I were walking back from the car today, after a ‘break’ talking about Logo Design.

It can be hard justifying the cost of some parts of what our company does sometimes. We talk about it a lot – I think in an effort to comfort each other over the guilt. A lot of our work, put in the simplest terms, consists of simply making things look better, and having fun while we do so. It’s hard to sometimes say “Well the thing with logos is that many of your customers may not even give it a second thought. It won’t have a direct and discreetly measurable affect on your business. In the chaotic nature of the world you could spent £400,000 and it could still have the adverse affect (like the Olympics logo – though it’s not directly measurable so we’ll never know). And yeah, you could get it done badly for £150. It’ll do the same thing, but, well, er, badly.

But our advice is to spend £10,000 with us and we’ll do it really well. Nah really mate…it’s a bargain. Just not a quantifiable one.”

Most design agencies that charge a lot of money for this kind of work will obviously say it makes a massive difference – that you can’t succeed with a bad logo, and that you need to communicate everything about your business in the first 0.3 seconds. But most of them also need to defend the huge amounts of money they get paid, for essentially doing something that, if done properly, is a massively creative and enjoyable.

So some days I’m not so sure if it’s a waste of money - or at least some days I can feel that it's hard to justify the large sums of money for that part of what we do. Other days I’m damn sure it’s the opposite, and the best values work we do. The way you present yourself affects so many things and can have benefits that you might not think about. Which brings me back round to the point (I knew I’d get there eventually…) One of Si’s points when we were talking is that he’s seen one of the logos he’s designed significantly change a company over the last year or so - not so much because of how it’s affected their clients, more how its affected the company’s owners and staff. (Though I'm assured it's gone done very well with clients as well.)

The logo and branding for that company is now everywhere – it surrounds the staff and is their stamp on the work they do, and it really does look great. And Si’s seen the company a lot over the past year, working with and for them, and he believes that it’s changed the attitude of the people who work there. That it’s given them a little more belief and changed how they perceive their own company, and that has undoubtedly help lead them to great results – more sales, growth, and an advancement of their ability to do a their jobs.

You can’t say for sure if the company would have done that without the new logo and branding. And you can’t say for sure if it made £10,000 worth of difference – though anyone who runs a business of any size knows how little money that really is in business terms. But the thing is they didn’t pay £10k, they paid a little over a tenth of that – and I’m positive that’s a gamble worth taking (admittedly they got an outstanding price due to the fact they’re business partners of ours - they should have paid a lot more).

I guess what I’m really saying is I can justify people giving us large amounts of money so we can carry on doing our massively creative and enjoyable jobs. At least to myself… :)

Putting the 'M' and possibly the 'a' in Mandy

Websites

My apologies for putting work stuff on here, but just in case anyone outside of the company ever does read this...

We put the Louhannah site live about 2 weeks ago...check it out http://www.louhannah.com

It's by far my favourite flash site we've produced so far. And amazingly Andy managed to build it so the site is updatable by the client using the pre-existing backend admin systems - even the photo gallery - the clever b*stard - it's as slick a front end as we've built so far.

Matt managed to build the whole bar in 3D (down to individual glasses and bottles in the bar, and putting the existing artwork on the walls) which enabled him to animate the fly-throughs...was extremely time consuming but well worth the finished result, and gives almost limitless in terms of future development of the site.

It was as far over budget as any project we've ever done. To the best of our calculations the client got over £9k of work for free. But it's a typical Sound In Theory project - done for the love of it, and over-delivery is inevitable in such cases. And if we never push boundaries how will we learn...?

I did jack on the site. Makes me even happier to see the result :) Very proud of the site - Matt & Andy (or Mandy for short) are a frighteningly talented team...

***wild applause for Mandy***

Wow, I'm still like, reeling from ben's post earlier. That rocked my world. Keep up the high octane action Mr Smith. Never stop!!

TXT vs The Cupboard

Screamin in the Angry Room VS expressing frustration in text form.

I is better at screamin than typing! although the blog would be more of a lasting memory. Is that a good thing!

Skills with the blog baynos. All I have to do now is:
1. Stop laughing at everyone elses blogs
2. Think of something to write
3. Remember we have a blog when I head for the cupboard

whatever next, a laser printer that dosent jam paper!

GOLB_TIS

Wow, the much awaited SIT_BLOG. Now we can express ourselves in textual form, rather than going into the 'angry' room to squeal loudly to ourselves... Is that a good thing?

Check My blog skills

As you can see they're limited at best

Blizzle ma nizzle

Yay blog blog blog blog blog...I've been pestering Dave for ages about making us a blog but turns out we couldve got one for free all along :)

So I look forward to posting much amounts of funny but pointless crap on here...perhaps even something work related from time to time.

Clearly I'll have to start now...

The Company So Far...

So this is a blog huh?

Well, I've just been told by Matt (or DJ Flat / matt_the_flat / columbo) that my name (Dave) is too boring. I don't however care. It's choices like that which will ensure this blog isn't going to end up losing us too much business... :)

So we're a small visual design / software / photography / film and everything else we can get our hands on kind of a company. Nine people full time, and plenty of satellites to help us with our cause. I think it's going quite well, but you can never be sure what's going to happen tomorrow with this business.

We've got a pretty strange business model, which wouldn't make sense to many, but seems to be making for a happy and productive work environment. I take that for the greatest sign that we're doing something right. We don't make as much money as we could, but I don't think there's anyone in in the company who values money more than numerous other things like freedom and quality of the work they do.

Anyways, just wanted to make a blog...get some momentum and all that...