Are Some People In The Industry Out Of Touch With Reality?

[Squirt]

Are Some People In The Industry Out Of Touch With Reality?

yes

:rain: :rain:
.:rip:.

[gaybucks_chip]

For the record, we charge $1000 for a logo design, you get 5 variations with multiple revisions
(snip)

... And if you think it's expensive, trying getting a quote from any decent agency.

To be fair, in the commercial world, using US-based designers and a proper logo design process, he's right. I've seen at the low end $500-1000 for a logo, and if you're talking major national companies, I've seen $5000-25000 at the low end. It's not uncommon for logo projects to go through 15 revisions and cost $2000. But in the adult world, of course, nobody wants to pay more than $100.

I suppose on one level if you get a great logo and you're happy with it, $1,000 is fine, but where I have a problem is if the design work is being done by people in India or Phillipines or Ukraine where the designer is getting $25 and the middleman is getting $975, and I think a lot of these design companies are doing stuff like that which seems a little uncool to me. I don't know if adultdesign's designers are US based or offshore, but if they are offshore, the prices seem steep.

[$tandaman]

To be fair, in the commercial world, using US-based designers and a proper logo design process, he's right. I've seen at the low end $500-1000 for a logo, and if you're talking major national companies, I've seen $5000-25000 at the low end. It's not uncommon for logo projects to go through 15 revisions and cost $2000. But in the adult world, of course, nobody wants to pay more than $100.

I suppose on one level if you get a great logo and you're happy with it, $1,000 is fine, but where I have a problem is if the design work is being done by people in India or Phillipines or Ukraine where the designer is getting $25 and the middleman is getting $975, and I think a lot of these design companies are doing stuff like that which seems a little uncool to me. I don't know if adultdesign's designers are US based or offshore, but if they are offshore, the prices seem steep.

I don't know of a single company, with a staff of 10 people or more who has US designers. What you speak of could have been true 5 years ago, when such drastic price difference was possible (but you are way off on the numbers). It's a global economy, because of the internet and you have to remember that.
Reality is, with USD being so down, everyone's costs who has employees in Europe has gone up by 50%(and more in some cases) in the last year and half. You don't realize that if you live in US, as very little has changed, but if you are in Europe you are well aware of that (if you charge in dollars).
Our prices remained the same, with slight adjustments for inflation. So now we get paid in USD, our costs are way higher then they were a year ago.. yet we can't pass the increase to our consumers, as we'll be getting 100's of threads like this

So we cope with it by increasing our volume. At this point we have 25 full time in-house designers & flashers, and with some people bitching and moaning, we are doing more business then ever. People try us, and they keep coming back

[gaybucks_chip]

What you speak of could have been true 5 years ago, when such drastic price difference was possible (but you are way off on the numbers).

Actually I'm not off at all. We currently employ several offshore designers and I know exactly what we pay them. It is of course more (in USD) than it was a year ago because of our crappy economy, but I'm quite aware of the going rates for designers in India, Phillipines, Pakistan, and a couple of Eastern European countries... and I mean the rates the designers actually get paid, not the highly inflated rates all of the middlemen charge their US customers, or the rates that the freelance designers charge American webmasters. We've also used offshore coders and I have a pretty good idea of those rates as well.

We also have a good relationship with several US-based design firms (and yes, there are many wonderful American firms with American-trained designers, which, with few exceptions, do much better work than any offshore designer I've used.) Plus, I actually know who is doing my work, whether offshore or in the US, so instead of wondering if my job is being given to the brand-new guy or the guy with the 10 years experience, I know for sure... and I can talk to that person directly, instead of going through an intermediary who translates, which often leads to miscommunication.

I'll also point out that anyone who can afford to absorb a 50% increase in costs without passing any of it on, has got to be working on enormous margin. Basic economics tells us that a 50% devaluation in currency would eat up the margin in practically any labor-based business unless the labor is being marked up hundreds of percent, which is I'm sure what the case is here.

At this point we have 25 full time in-house designers & flashers, and with some people bitching and moaning, we are doing more business then ever. People try us, and they keep coming back

There are a lot of people for whom convenience is worth a lot more than money. For those people, paying a middleman 5 or 6 times the actual labor rate may make sense if they want to avoid hassle and always have someone they can count on. The sad thing is, these same people, if they're willing to pay those rates, could easily afford an outstanding American designer with better skills and training, without having to deal with the hassles of offshore communications, time zone differences, payment via unstable services like Epassporte, and so forth.

As I said, I congratulate anyone who can market a product at such an enormous margin, be it design services, software development application software, or anything else. I don't have any problem with someone saying "We're amazing, we charge a fortune because we're worth it, and people pay it." What annoys me is when someone tells me their costs are a bazillion times higher than they actually are, and uses that as an excuse to justify the price.

[abostonboy]

I always get a little "nervous" of design firms that "claim" they did designs for big sites and actually use that as a sales tool, only to have the person that they supposedly did the design work have to clarify just how much design work they actually did and how much they changed the design before it went live.