Why should you pay someone to layout a brochure or a logo or a website, when you can get someone to do it for less than nothing online? Well, the reason is because good advertising – RESULTS driven advertising – requires graphic designing and advertising strategy and several other skills that can’t be performed without a team coordinator or project manager. To create a design that works, you need a group of educated & experienced professionals that will take the time to think about what you need to do, who you’re trying to reach and what’s the best way to get there involves strategic, creative AND technical talent. Designers need to know how to make something that looks good AND something that works AND something that is technically set up properly to be printed or emailed or posted on the web. The people who know how to do that CORRECTLY have been to college for at least 4 years [to learn how to prepare the digital files to go to press] and it takes a significant chunk of time to prepare the files for you, so just using that logic we can surmise that vendor would probably NOT want to do that for $20. IF a designer offers to do a job like that for you for an amount of money that seems “too good to be true” then remember, just like with any other vendor, it probably IS too good to be true!
I have managed a team of graphic designers & web programmers for nearly 25 years now and I can tell you that I spend at least 60% of our production time fixing artwork for customers who have just tried to work with the $25 artists. What scares me more than those people are the clients who don’t realize that they don’t have good, solid technical files and end up sending the job to print, only to realize that they’ve lost thousands of dollars in the end.
The fact of the matter is that we’re living in tough economic times and YES there’s a lot of price pressure right now so you can probably negotiate to get the price down on your graphic design work, but just keep in mind that if a designer is willing to create your brochure or business card or logo for 1/10th the price of any other quotes you have received, then something is most likely NOT RIGHT. Don’t waste your money with vendors who don’t know what they’re doing….get your job done right the first time and save yourself a lot of time and headache by hiring someone who knows the trade. If the vendor is offering to create a brochure for you “overnight” or for less than anyone else, RUN don’t walk, RUN!
