So is this guy trying to make the point that "design is worthless"?
A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
91–100 of 107 posts
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know only 2 MPs or so were prosecuted. Considering the enquiry cost several million, that doesn't seem like money well spent.
Money spent on stuff like that can act as a deterrant for the future.. So it might be about break-even.
Can also dissuade good people from going into politics if their every expense will be scrutinize nit-picked etc.
Why put up with all the BS and low pay of politics when you can go work for a big company and run up massive expense accounts for lap dancing clubs or whatever else you feel like?
I'd say the jury's out on it...
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#93Great point! The government should source all their development work from craigslist from now on!
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#94If you are retouching a favicon pixel-by-pixel I can see that racking up a few hours: £585 = $944, so if a designer is say charging $150 to work on a complex logo that would quickly add up. It's actually much harder to create something good in the space of just a few pixels as opposed to a social media icon which might give you 100 pixels.
By the way I noticed yesterday that Hacker news is going to start a designer's directory because there "are so few good designers". I submit the problem really is that there are so few programmers who can be bothered to learn anything about designers or how they work.
In fact the very notion that designers are some secondary set of dumb hands is quite insulting. The reality is that product design (of any sort) should START with a designer and not an engineer. VCs should give more serious thought that an BFA or MFA is worth far more than a CS or MBA.
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I can vouch for this as a former government worker. While FOIA is vital for transparency in government, there is usually quite a lot of man hours put into fulfilling these requests.
As a taxpayer, I'm quite happy to pay for this type of friction. Because the flip side of that is that government employees are constantly aware of the possibility of a FOIA request. I've no doubt it also places overall friction as everyone is constantly in CYA mode (I've worked in govt before) but even still I think the benefits outweigh the negatives. Even tax officials have to be polite to you, even if their objective is to extract a massive fine.
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Freedom is not free.
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> £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?
I'd be happy to help you for free. My email is in my HN profile.
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> £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.
Knowing how to do it naturally includes "knowing how to land the job". Not as easy as it sounds.
I recognize that there can be a lot of government hoops to jump through that can legitimately make it expensive to do business with them, but I don't see why the government had to outsource that to begin with.
I say that because I remember it taking me only a few minutes to go from knowing nothing whatsoever about them to making my own.
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
See the Colour of the Bike Shed.
Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Any costs incurred in responding to Freedom of Information requests are the price you pay for not being sufficiently open in the first place. If you pro-actively published everything that people are entitled to know (i.e. that you would have to release in response to a request), then these costs would be close to zero.