The relationship of time and money within design

There is a big difference between professional design and imagery, and messing about using apps like Canva or Paint on your own computer at home – but unfortunately some businesses don’t understand the difference.

It takes time to create professional design work and if you compare the quality of a finished product from an expert designer, to one produced at home on a PC, the difference is very clear – it does come down to you get what you pay for.

If you want to buy a Rolls Royce then you pay more money. The same applies to design – if you want a great professional look and feel for your business then it takes time and time costs money.

Here at Frost Creative, we are a professional service organisation providing branding services to all kinds of businesses and we bill for our time, just like a solicitors or an accountant would do.

We don’t charge by the hour for our work – we provide a cost upfront for the project and that’s the final fee regardless of whether we’ve spent 20 hours on a job and only quoted for 12. It’s important to us that we deliver on time and good quality and our clients know what they will pay.

We also know that there are likely to be changes required to we include three amendment stages within our costs. We like to stick with the original fee but if the goal posts move drastically from the original brief we will have a discussion with our clients first.

In the design world, the more time that is spent on a project by the experts, the better the end result will be but clearly that time has to be paid for. We can’t produce the Mona Lisa in a day – if you only want to pay for a day then the result will reflect the time spent.

The more detailed a briefing a client can provide in the first place, having done their own research, the less time the agency will need to spend scrabbling around trying to work out what is required.

Having a realistic budget and a proper brief up front will help to make life much easier for both parties from the outset and result in a great outcome from the project which should leave everyone happy.

If you don’t value your business enough to pay for professional design and prefer to stick with DIY design then that’s your choice but coming up with a realistic budget to use experts to help you will always produce much better results.

If you’d like to talk to us at Frost Creative about a design project, or you’d like an idea for how long a piece of work might take to complete, then give us a call today.