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A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

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Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#61

Post by kez »

andylei wrote: post #25
larrik wrote: post #18

1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately) 2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that. 3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual designer.…

arguably, the FOIA request cost the government as much money as the favicon, since these employees would have had to dig through old records to gather the information, as well as respond to the emails

You are of course, correct (as ry0ohki states), but this one FOIA request could lead the way to more competitive favicon quotes from contractors in the future, leaving a net saving for HMG.

Sounds facetious, but it's this transparency that enables public scrutiny (and outrage). The expenses debacle being one such example.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#62

Post by jefe78 »

andylei wrote: post #25
larrik wrote: post #18

1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately) 2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that. 3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual designer.…

arguably, the FOIA request cost the government as much money as the favicon, since these employees would have had to dig through old records to gather the information, as well as respond to the emails

As a 'victim' of a few FOIA requests, I can vouch for how much work goes into them. A favicon? Who cares when you've just involved 2 managers, a director and 4 mid-level federal officials? Some FOIA's were beyond reasonable and duly denied, but the reasonable ones could still take days.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#63

Post by axod »

The irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost, likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out.

Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than was paid out originally in expenses.

£585 is nothing in that sort of context.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#64

Post by alexqgb »

rriepe wrote: post #45

If you factor in the time for bothersome, inane e-mails, then their 585 figure makes more sense.

That's actually not a joke. There is probably a whole layer of internal costs for every government agency involved, maintaining the paper trails that allow these questions to be answered in the first place.

There's a near-zero probability that these laws (yes, laws) don't have some impact on the job-management process, which will carry into procedural burdens for vendor to factor into their quoted prices.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#65

Post by VladRussian »

common guys! the 53 miles of US border fence cost 1B.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41083850/ns/us_news-security/

It is about $300/inch. That would be 53 miles of new favicon/inch ($300 vs 585 pounds - thats 70% volume discount given by Boing to teh US government). Look at the picture at the link above - it is a really hi-tech fence.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#66

Post by angrycoder »

axiom wrote: post #22
larrik wrote: post #18

1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately) 2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that. 3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual designer.…

Ok, lets say it didn't take 5 minutes. Lets say it took 3 hours for a designer to make the favicon pixel by pixel, and 1 hour for a developer to upload the favicon to the server (maybe he only has one arm or something, I don't know, bare with me.) That's ~$230/hr. Really, you can't argue that this wasn't crazy expensive. However, when it comes to government waste this is a pretty trivial example.

You should read up on bike sheds if you don't understand how something as simple as a fav icon can turn into a 10-15 hour endeavor. Particularly when the client is a government agency or a large company.

http://bikeshed.org/

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#67

Post by RaRic »

Natsu wrote: post #52
burgerbrain wrote: post #16

£1 for the new favicon, £584 for knowing how to do it.

> £584 for knowing how to do it. 1) Draw crappy icon in any of the zillion free icon editors out there (e.g. IconEdit32). 2) Name the file 'favicon.ico' and upload it to the root directory of the website. I have a feeling I should be doing consulting in the UK or something.

I need a favicon. Will you do it for ten bucks?

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#69

Post by Silhouette »

jasondavies wrote: post #10

Somewhat ironic that the favicon was for an organisation called ICO.

Also ironic that if you hover over it in Firefox, it says "This web site does not supply identity information." :-)

(The ICO is the UK government body responsible for, among other things, regulating the processing and disclosure of personal data.)

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#70

Post by msbarnett »

spxdcz wrote: post #20
larrik wrote: post #18

1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately) 2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that. 3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual designer.…

True, but this DOES look like a five minute project. I just screen-grabbed their large logo, put it into Photoshop, reversed the colors and reduced it to 16x16, and it looks almost exactly the same as their icon - no pixel-pushing required. Sure, the colors aren't perfect, but any semi-decent graphic designer could produce that favicon (from the original logo) in 10 minutes maximum. It's not a complicated face, or an…

I suspect this is a case of £5 for the final icon, £580 for the other 10 comps and three rounds of meetings you had to go through to decide on the inverted version in the first place.

It's trivial to recreate the end result, but you can't ignore that the end result wasn't a foregone conclusion; ideas had to be floated and presented and agreed upon, etc. Especially with high-politic clients, getting consensus on even a small thing can take a lot of time.

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