I worked for Gary on Thursday. It was pretty easy money. All I did was take some photos of the furniture, cut them out of their background and put them on an A4 piece of paper to display on some of the windows.
I had intended to also write out some more price labels, but for some reason, Tracy, Laura's friend was there and as soon as I walked in, I noticed that all of the price labels had already been printed off. Badly.
You see, I realise it's just a piece of paper with a price and item name on it, but what bugs the hell out of me is that they look crap compared to mine, even though they're similar and even though mine themselves aren't a work of art. For example, all of my text is in Myriad Bold, which is a great font to use. The price is in red and the item name is in black, with the name of the item's range in the top right corner. They were designed in Photoshop.
Tracy's on the other hand look crap. They use Arial Bold, stretched (always a no-no), along with Times New Roman for the range name and they were designed in WORD of all things. There's no similarities to one label and the next, as she's chosen to do some labels vertically and some of them horizontally, all in different sizes. It looks stupid.
I guess I shouldn't even be that annoyed. I mean, it's not my warehouse and it's not me who wants to sell the furniture. But, since I'm there, employed as someone to give his business a bit more of a change in the graphic design section, it annoys me greatly when it's not done properly.
I was going to redo all of the labels, but I won't. I know that Gary won't ask me to redesign them either, because he'll be happy with them the way they are, even though they're designed badly because just like Tracy, he doesn't have that much of a clue about design either. Tracy hadn't even heard of Photoshop.
The warehouse is absolutely freezing. There's no heating and hardly any electricity. There's tiles missing from the ceiling in the office where I work on the computer so any heat that's emitted from the two heaters in there simply goes straight through the ceiling and out through the roof of the warehouse, leaving me very cold.
Gary was ready to lock up at 3pm. I was quite happy to carry on working but he paid me my �100 and I went home. Very easy money.
However, I'm worried that he will want me to start designing things like business cards and letterheads. I don't mind designing them, but it's the fact that if I wasn't working for him in the way that I am currently, for example, if he wanted me to make him a letterhead, I'd charge him maybe �120. Business cards would probably be the same. Currently, he is paying me �100 for one day's work, two times a week. That's �200. By not working for him in that way, but him being my client instead, I'd earn another �40 on top of that. And that's just two examples.
Say he wanted me to design a website. Depending on the complexity of the site, I'd probably charge in excess of �600.
With a job such as graphic design, it's not how long it takes you to create it, but how well you do so. I could create a letterhead in ten minutes and so could someone else, but if they don't have an artistic bone in their body, then obviously mine is going to look a lot better. It's not the time you're paying for, it's the skill.
I'm not saying that I'm some sort of amazing, talented artist, because I'm not. I'm just saying that I know what looks good and I know what doesn't look good and for that, I'd like fair payment for those skills. While �100 IS great money, it doesn't cover the cost of most things design-wise and I'm not quite sure how I deal with this? What do I do when Gary asks me to design something for him that's worth more than �100? I don't think it's fair on me to offer my skills for less than what they're actually worth.
While I may not have an excellent grip on the average fees a graphic designer would charge for designing x, y and z, I'd like to think that I at least have some idea, with the help of my tutors too and that's why I'd charge the amounts I've stated. Why should I charge less than the going rate and settle for �200 a week instead?
To put that in context, the men who work for Gary doing stuff like putting furniture together are probably on �200 as well and in those terms, I'm no better off even though I have a better skill than them that will get more customers through the door. I just want to make sure that I get paid fairly, that's all.
Currently, I don't think I'm being paid fairly. I think I'm being paid too much. I haven't done much to deserve �100 a day. I've said this to Gary already. However, as I say, I know that in the future, he's going to want me to design stuff that in any other circumstance would cost him much more than �100 and I need some advice on what I should do when that happens?
My Mum got 1000 flyers printed, advertising the warehouse. I designed the flyer. They're going to be distributed by Tracy in the local town centre. That will undoubtedly get Gary a lot more business.
Enough about that.
In other news, I've been absent from college since Wednesday and I have a hell of a lot of work to complete. I've told myself that I'm going to do it all over the weekend. I need to. My deadline is Friday, which is when I have to actually display everything. I have a hell of a lot to do.
I'm usually good with deadlines, even though I always leave everything until the last minute. Pressure works for me it seems. I'm hoping it will this time too.
So much for not having anything to write about.
