Too Many Zeroes
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Too Many Zeroes

April 4th, 2012 [ Tags: , ]

Ah, math. Learn it. Know it. Live it.

There comes a point in your design career when you stop expecting clients to tell you the truth. It is, perhaps, a very cynical moment, but it will come. When you start out all wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, you bend over backwards to suss out the insane double speak that clients use during the course of a project. As you get along in years and work with many more clients, you realize that understanding such nonsense is absolutely impossible.

So you learn to say “no.”

“No” is tough, especially if you’re freelancing. You need work to pay the bills. Turning down work means turning down money which potentially means turning off your electricity. But the hard truth is that there are certain gigs that would cost you much more than you’d make. “No” can sometimes save you money.

7Comment



  • awesomemvs

    stop forgetting to draw her hair in the last panel!!!111111111111111111111111

  • http://cocktailchem.blogspot.com JordanDevereaux

    You know, just in case she didn’t already want to jump his bones.

  • reynard61

    “’No’ is tough, especially if you’re freelancing. You need work to pay the bills. Turning down work means turning down money which potentially means turning off your electricity. But the hard truth is that there are certain gigs that would cost you much more than you’d make. ‘No’ can sometimes save you money.”

    The problem (especially in the current Economy) is that saying “No” to Certain Gigs (as in “That gig that could make or break your reputation”), even though both you *and* The Client *KNOW* that it’s bad for you, can be tantamount to professional suicide. I had an acquaintence who was forced into such a situation — during better economic times, I might add. It did not end well for them. They had to lay off about half of their staff and eventually had to move to another town because The Client went ahead and threw them under the bus *ANYWAY* just because they could. (The Client was — and still is — one of the largest businesses in the area and isn’t above making sure that things *stay* that way. It also didn’t hurt that The Client has a huge legal team that makes it pretty much immune to any legal challenge.)

  • Kugelblitz00

    … and we need some test subjects.

  • http://ypcomic.com Jamie Noguchi

    gah! haiiiiir!!!!!!!

  • awesomemvs

    I’m a freelance writer and I can’t believe magazines expect me to write them full-length travel articles for $25. And they can use those articles for ebooks later without paying for reprint rights. When you’re a content creator instead of a designer, the problem is that you can get desperate for any money and give people endless rights to make money off of your work and walk away with restaurant dinner money yourself. (look at GoNomad’s writer’s guidelines–they’re hilarious)
    I’ve never written an article for less than $150, and that was the one I wrote at 17.

  • http://www.facebook.com/fbromley Frank Bromley

    it amazes me how often companies will try and screw over graphic artists