Re: graphics designer needed for logo help

[voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

see in line



2011/4/28 Rédacteur en chef <editorialstandards -at- gmail -dot- com>

> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:17 PM, voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> > That's a rather broad brush. I neither work for a big company nor with
> > enormous budgets. I am simply a "living wage" advocate, and believe that
> > people should get paid for work that they do.
>
> "Living wage" means different things to different people.
>

Hence the quotes. I've had many a late-night conversation with freelancers
in other parts of the world, where I discovered one could comfortably feed,
clothe and house a family of 4 on $150.00 a week, and they were quite happy
to work for those rates. I do not begrudge these people an income, even if
it's from someone down the street from me.  Nor do I begrudge the student or
young person struggling to make a name/living for themselves.

However, there are places on line that have a tendency to take advantage of
the naive or the desperate, and that is something that I will speak out
about when presented with an opportunity.

>
> To a kid still in school (in which I include "kids" in their
> twenties) it means something very different from what it
> means to a mid-forties family breadwinner.  One still
> has a feel for living in cramped shared quarters,
> eating a lot of KD or ramen, and taking laundry home
> for Mom to do. The other has to provide food, shelter,
> clothing, transportation for self and dependents.
>
> Same assertion, substituting "person living in village in
> fly-over country" and "person living in NY, NY, or San Diego.
>
> So basically, if you need something done, and can live
> with what you get from inexperienced kids, you pay what
> that market will bear, and people who have more baggage
> and higher expectations in life won't apply.
>
> Nothing forces anybody to apply for a job that doesn't
> pay what they think their time and skills and effort
> are worth.
>
> As techwriters, we constantly deal with the fallout of
> "it's just writing English (or other language). Anybody
> can do that." We just - mostly - don't go for those jobs.
>
> If we find ourselves in a financial hard place, we do
> take such jobs, because the basics are familiar (we know
> what to do, without training) or because it'll look
> better on a resume than flipping burgers for the same
> pittance until the market improves.
>
> There's no way to mandate a "living wage" for everyone,
> regardless of circumstances, training, relevance, etc.,
> without legislation. Legislation of that nature brings
> the bottom up by:
>
>  - raising it out of reach of some people (*)
>  - pulling the top and middle lower, to "pay" for it
>
>  ["Pay" means not just direct monetary extraction,
>  like taxes, but skills-and-experience devaluation
>  for those who thought they'd paid their dues. ]
>
> (*You can either mandate that anybody, regardless of
> qualification must be accepted - in which case
> employers stop employing or start piling the task
> into the workload of existing employees - or you set
> some official lower limits of skill/qualification,
> below which people cannot be hired. Remember when
> companies used to employ their own janitorial staff?
> Regular jobs with benefits - low pay notwithstanding.
> Now its all immigrants working as temps or as
> "sub-contractors" for hustlers who sell the service
> to your company, and your waste basket gets emptied
> every couple of nights (because there aren't enough
> [paid] hours in the night, or good people can't be
> allowed to work longer than X hours before automatic
> entitlements kick in), and your carpet gets
> vacuumed perhaps monthly and it's your own
> responsibility to dust your cube and wipe the coffee
> stains.
> A lot of that started in jurisdictions where the
> minimum wage was raised and only very small companies
> (Joe's office-cleaning service) were exempted, or
> nobody was exempted and they jumped past the small
> company paying low wages stage, directly to one-person
> company "employing" sub-contractors in place of
> employees.  The model persists until inflation
> catches up and the legislated minimum is no longer
> a problem for any employer, and people go back to
> actually hiring regular crew they can depend on. Then
> the legislature feels some heat and jacks the minimum
> or otherwise tweaks the rules again. And repeat.)
>

Not going to get into a political discussion with you, which is where this
is heading.

>
>
> > One more thing to keep in mind when asking for spec work in contests is
> that
> > (if you do some research into it) you as a client are going to be
> > responsible for making sure your logo doesn't infringe on anyone else's
> > trademark, nor is it ripped off from another artist (or clip art or
> derived
> > from stock photography violating their license agreement), which is what
> > happens frequently on the cheap logo contest websites (according to
> > information from specwatch.info site)
>
> Very good point, and one of the best arguments for hiring skilled,
> experienced people if you can possibly afford to - and deciding
> that it's better to afford them now than to have no choice but afford
> the lawyers later.
>
> > Off the top of my head, GAG (Graphic Artists' Guild - to which I belong)
> and
> > AIGA are the big professional graphic artist organizations in the US.
>
> Just curious: what sort of entry standards do GAG and
> AIGA have?  Do they support "living wage" in the
> graphic and design industry for anybody who wants
> to hang a shingle, or only for members?
>

I'm not a member of AIGA (their entry fees are too high for where I am in my
business right now), so I don't know exactly what they do, however, they
also are not advocates of spec work.

GAG publishes a pricing guidelines book for various freelance services based
on current market rates, which is extremely useful. They also do some
political action work regarding IP laws and small business reporting (the
most recent being to get the filing of 1099 forms for every vendor to whom
you give more than $600 in a year, citing an undue paperwork burden on
freelancers). Going to their respective websites will inform you about what
they do for their members.


>
>  </kevin>
> --
>    __o
> _`\<,_
> (*)/ (*)
> Don't go away. We'll be right back.  .
>
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