Posted by on Jul 31, 2009 in Cool Design Tech, My Business Adventures, Rants | 0 comments

One of the most overused words I hear when I talk to a client is the word “Simple”

“I want my website to be real simple”. “This shouldn’t cost so much because I want it real simple”. “My illustration should just take you a few minutes because it’s really simple”

AAAAAAgh. Folks, never approach a graphic designer with that word. Do you know what we hear when the word “simple” is spoken?  Translation: Make the estimate higher.

Do you know why?  There’s usually 2 reasons:

  1. Whenever you have something that is “simple”, it actually means MORE time and effort was put into it. Look at how intuitive your iPhone works, or how straightfoward it is to use Gmail. How did they get that way? Usually it means groups of intelligent people hired to spend months and months, even years, crunching around a table figuring out how to make it simple. And then they sit around focus groups and run endless beta tests to even refine it further.
  2. I’m not going to categorize everyone like this…but it’s more often than not that the person who says “simple” is the one that’s the MOST picky about their work. This person is usually not very clear what they want – but they want the designer to find the perfect solution with expectation it’ll take a minimum amount of work.

So the next time you call your graphic designer wanting some work done. Avoid this word. Take some time to think about what you want and be as specific as you can be about what you’re looking for. (i.e., find examples of things you like, look for competitor examples & think about how you’d like to stand apart from them, describe things that you must have and things you’d like to avoid, etc.).

This is the ONLY way to reduce your design costs.