281–290 of 789 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it. People hate changes to their workflow.
People crave consistency. McDonald’s isn’t popular because it’s good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is the same you’d get in Pigeon Forge, TN.
After that, everything else could be done by a middling freelance designer with Squarespace. No web dev required.
I don't necessarily think the agency had especially ill intent, but the way they work is clearly not accommodating of clients with restricted budgets and they should probably not have taken the job to begin with.
It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency. They ripped you off =/ No two ways about it. > I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match. I was used to working with individual freelancers, and WebAgency was accustomed to larger clients. ...I think that is a very forgiving, but utterly self-doormatt…
I've learned to keep things vague. I'm even careful about writing complimentary stuff; usually, if I have had a hand in it, I generally try to avoid directly naming.
I am very careful about writing non-complimentary stuff; even if I have documented proof. In these cases, I may keep it to direct personal experience, and avoid directly naming the guilty parties. I've found that people don't heed warnings, so I'm not actually doing anyone a favor.
Lawyers in the US can get awful indiscriminate, when it comes to dragging people into court, and I have found that most organizations have many teams; not all of which may be bad/good.
Curious what others think of the icon progression? There was an article a week or so ago about how all cool/crazy/distinctive logo designs trend to boring sameness. The end design looks like something I'd expect to see on the Delta app I download when I fly and promptly redelete afterwards. My person favorite, for reasons I don't understand, is the center icon in the first column. I don't know why. I just like it's d…
I prefer it pre-colour too. I have no idea why they thought the ones that scream 'messaging app' were a good idea. The face ones are weird. I think there's two jobs involved really though, and (as an armchair expert who's never done it) that ideally you do the first one of roughing out an idea for what it should look like yourself. The second job is refining it, tweaking the edges, weight, choosing exactly the right…
Unfortunately, I have to agree with the parent that something "fun" was lost in the transition from the original logo to the new one. From the mock-ups, I can tell that the client definitely wanted to maintain the green cursor, which is good, but likely trusted the designers to know the market for remote KVM (which I've used for years), which doesn't conjure a physical plane - more of you being a pilot - in control. It's possible the client wanted to keep the logo really simple to make it 3D-printable.
What's done is done, but just for fun, I mocked-up a logo [0] (posted on another response as well) that reflects the original character of the company in a modern format - at least to me. Corporate branding is critical, and nailing the logo has traditionally been a difficult task.
Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I've never seen it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients tripping over themselves to hire us. That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to…
And that big, fancy agency will outsource the whole project for 1/20 of the paying price to a small company.
> Isaac... felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency’s difficulty scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot’s budget. Their typical client has a retainer in the range of $20-40k per month. I think Isaac nailed it. It's just a different mindset between providing a full-service development group and doing a focused update of a site for a small business (very small... one might say "tiny" :) But I think this wa…
I don't want to rub salt in the wounds here, but that design is extremely mediocre. The primary mistake here imo was to think you needed professional web design in the first place. You didn't. Professional web design is best suited to companies with a strong brand or websites with complicated UX/UI that needs wireframing. You're just a small business selling KVMs D2C. That doesn't need anything fancy. There are some…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didnt hire people. You hired a company. That abused your good faith. Also, 'If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire', appearantly not? They clearly where not using their time, your money, effectively.
I don't think the problem here was in using their time effectively. Or, at least, it wasn't the high-order bit. Looking at their task breakdown, there weren't outrageous items like "10 hours - change a button color." The times were a little higher than I'd expect for devs who do this all the time, but not egregiously so. I think I overspent on this project, but I attribute it more to poor communication and poor manag…
"You don't fit our usual workflow so no further work will be done unless you pay us a retainer like the big guys do" is simply not a good faith position to take half way into a project.
They gave you just enough extra attention to hook you in at the start, then kept stringing you along for more cash, with a few token deductions to make it seem like it was all just very unfortunate. (Note: They would not have made those deductions if you hadn't called them on it.)
Then when it was clear there was no more money on the table they finally did the work - which, conveniently, left you with a positive impression.
They did not do the job you originally asked them to do. They did a job they decided they wanted to do - and charge for - because... why? They're not organised and professional enough to deliver what they were asked to?
It's a classic case of actions speaking louder than words.
Some questions to consider:
1. Would you have hired them if you knew they were going to cost nearly seven times more than your budget?
2. How much would a website redesign have cost if you'd asked for that in the first place?
3. Do you think that work would have been done in budget, or would it have exploded far beyond it too?
4. Would a different agency have acted in the same way and presented the same problems?
Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I've never seen it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients tripping over themselves to hire us. That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to…
> Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k
These times are way overdue to end and it seems like they are ...