Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

Dirty Creative is two designers who wanted to start a design blog to eventually promote their brand and design work.  Their mission statement: perpetuate creativity.  We took the project looking at sites like Smashing Magazine, PSD Tuts+, Anthem, and core77 for the kind of site that they were trying to build.  As such, we were really excited to take part in what would, ultimately, be an awesome design magazine-style blog.

We went back and forth a bit on the design, and ultimately settled on a fairly clean, grid-based design that used an easily readable post layout with a cascading array of posts that would display in different formats on different pages and in different parts of the page.  Common to many of the sites we looked at, was a large, featured post area, for which we used the fantastic Dynamic Content Gallery by Studiograsshopper.  The posts on the home page display large with an excerpt, and then small at the bottom of the page with only the post title.  The right sidebar then displays the next several posts, so, just by looking at the front page of the site, you can easily navigate to the 8 most recent posts in addition to those featured in the Dynamic Content Gallery.  We used a similar layout for category and post archive pages, allowing the content to entice the reader to click into the post by giving them a thumbnail and an excerpt.

The design also gave them an opportunity to sell ad space on the home page and in the sidebar, and we made it so that they could also easily update the background image  whenever they wanted.

Single posts and pages use a different, but similar, sidebar layout, displaying the most recent posts, but abandoning the thumbnail, giving the site a more dynamic feel.  We also designed custom buttons for various social networks to allow their visitors to engage with them off the site as well.  The result is a bold and striking design that compliments their brash style.  Honestly, we can’t wait to see more from these guys and look forward to watching the site grow.

www.dirtycreative.com

WordPress plugins and scripts used: Dynamic Content Gallery, TimThumb

there are a few of these floating around on the web…

a few months ago, smashing magazine posted an article called Quality-Price-Ratio in Web Design (Pricing Design Work).  i’m not going to recap the article, you can go over there and read it yourself if you’re interested — it’s a good read both, i think, for designers as well as people trying to shop for good designers.  there were two main points of the article: 1) price and quality do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, and 2) generally speaking, you get what you pay for.

the article posed a solution for designers for pricing their work, a formula.  yes, there are lots of pricing  your work formulas out there, but this one has a lot of room for variation depending on how much you value  your own work.  the formula goes like this:

price = creativity coefficient x cost of doing business

cost of doing business is obvious — it’s what most of these calculators are for.  but what, you ask, is the creativity coefficient?  it’s the amount by which you determine the value of your services.  anyone can come up with an estimate based roughly on the cost of doing business — the variation comes when you’re trying to figure out how much to add to that so that you can actually make money doing design.  if you’re just making ends meet to pay the bills, you’re probably in the wrong industry.  the so-called creativity coefficient includes difficulty of the project, your company’s brand strength, and your style or individuality.  there is no 1-10 scale, it’s all left open-ended and depending on  how you value your own services, a project could be valued at $100 or $10,000, it all depends on the numbers you plug in.

so i made a spreadsheet with formulas to come up with a couple different quotes based on different sets of variables as a way to get an idea how to price each project.  the reason i like a range is because another factor is the audience — who you’re proposing this quote for and what they’re expectations are.  certainly you could give them a high bid and if they walk away, well, that’s their loss, but we don’t typically work that way.  and anyway, we’re just getting started and don’t have heavy brand strength or traffic yet.

because i’ve used this a few times, i thought it would be useful for other designers, or for people shopping for design to get an idea of how our pricing systems may work.  so i’m offering up my version of the designer’s cost calculator.

how it works

the first thing you do is plug in your expenses.  for designers this is your cost of doing business, and if you work from home, you can include things like a percentage of your mortgage or rent for the space you use as your office, internet service, software and hardware upgrades, etc.  basically, all that stuff that you should be itemizing on your taxes that help you run your business.  that creates your operating cost.  i then break down the operating cost to cost-per-day, which divides your monthly expenses by 25 (for 25 business days in a month).  then my formula branches out — i have a set of numbers based on 8-hour days, and a set of numbers that divides your daily operating cost by 24 (for instance, if you’re including things like electricity bills or other expenses that are an always-on sort of thing).  i also have a place to enter your hourly rate for comparison.

that’s all the setup.  so you have a project, what do you do?  first, figure out approximately how long it will take.  i break this down in days and hours.  then you plug in the difficulty, brand strength, and individuality variables of the creativity coefficient. and that’s it.  now you have a range of quotes based on different variables.  i have a quote based solely on number of hours x hourly rate (and does not take into account the creativity coefficient), one that is based on the 8 hour operating cost, one that is based on the 24 hour operating cost, and one that is based on the daily operating cost.  then i take a median of all four and offer that up as well.

it’s a bit of overkill, but it can be tweaked and customized, and i like having options.  and that’s why i’m offering it up.  you can take it and do whatever you want with it, change the formula, hard code your creativity coefficient, whatever.  it’s yours.

the zip file contains 3 versions for different formats; xlsx for office 2007, xls for all other versions of office, and ods for OpenOffice.org and other open office projects.

download designer cost calculator 27.3 kB
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When we first started doing website design about a year and a half ago, I was still working full time doing Tier 2 escallation technical support on Windows servers and client PCs for a major grocery chain.  I started doing freelance contract work for a local hosting company with a large outsource design department.  When I started to see the potential to turn that into a full-time job, I quit my cushy, salaried, tech support job with good benefits to work from home, with no benefits, and took on a part-time job at Whole Foods Market.  This time, I wasn’t in a corporate office, but out on the floor, throwing freight with the Grocery team, and then later, being a bit more visual, creating displays and cutting and wrapping cheese in the Specialty department.

Between the freelance, contracted design work, building up our own design studio as ThinkTank Studio, and working at Whole Foods, Erin and I had one day off a week.  If we were lucky.  And we often worked 12 hour days.

Earlier this year, we relaunched our business as Arcane Palette Creative Design.  It was more than just a name change.  Part of the transition was a vow to do what we love doing, and to choose not to do things that we are not excited about.  One of the things this included was no longer doing outsource design work for other people — there were a lot of sites we did that we put some of our best work into, and it got branded with someone else’s name.  If we’re going to put our best work out there, we want to be able to claim it.

Now we move into a new phase.

This last weekend was my last at Whole Foods.  Now I can devote 100% of my attention and energy into Arcane Palette.  This is an exciting thing, something that just struck me suddenly last night.  It’s always been something that both of us have dreamed of to work for ourselves, doing something we love doing.  Honestly, part of me never really believed that was a real possibility.  But here we are, we’re doing it, we’re making our business succeed and not accepting failure.  Even now, with this economy, we have been able to push forward to a point in which it was no longer possible to grow further as long as I had another job.  It is liberating to sit here and know that I really am the only boss of me and that my work week is made up of design and coding for Arcane Palette.  I can’t tell you how rewarding it feels to know that we literally built this from nothing and now it’s our full-time gig.  It makes you really believe the old adage that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

Thanks, McFly.