Creative business com (a quickie)

http://www.creativebusiness.com/ is a commercial site providing articles, tools and forms to, well, creative businesses.

While they offer many forms and articles for free, they also have paying articles and sell CD anthologies of their content. I have to admit that there are topics on the paying side that I have never seen covered in any business or creative blog so that alone might be worth paying for.  I invite you to have a look at the free stuff to give you a better idea of the kind of content they are providing, I’m sure you will learn something, I know I have.

How much to charge? 5 quick tips

I’ll get more in depth about rates later but here are some quick tips to get started, they are inspired by the Employment discussion section over at Conceptart.org where I serve as section mod.

My first tip is to get this book Graphic Artist’s Guild Handbook Pricing & Ethical Guidelines it has essential info about most graphic design jobs and many informations that can relate to other parts of the visual art field. It doesn’t cover staff work or videogame work but it has exemples of rates for everything from wallpaper designs to magazine cover photos.

Product description from Amazon:The most respected single reference for buyers and sellers of creative work returns in an updated ninth edition, containing the latest, essential information on business, pricing, and ethical standards for nearly every discipline in the visual communications industry–from advertising to publishing to corporate markets

The GAG being handy fellows, they also provide us with an Estimate Tutorial. Nice slideshow, if a bit basic. It covers the bases of what you should consider when making a price.

My second tip is if you are not from North America, look into local artists associations an guilds they often have pricing guidelines, even if these are not as comprehensive as the GAG handbook.

My third tip is in case what you are doing is not listed in the book or you simply don’t have the book. Evaluate the time the job will take you, add time for revisions, decide on a per hour rate, multiply it by the time you will need. Then evaluate the materials needed, add to the amount for time or quote separately. There you are. It’s probably the best way to rate jobs like game assets or portrait commissions. Log the time you spend on project so that you can better evaluate the time you need later for similar assignements.

My fourth tip is not so much about the price per say. Make a quote template with your terms of services on it and a personalized letterhead. Stating the rights you give for that price and your payment terms upfront looks professional. You can reuse that template while changing the infos and save time. I save mine as PDF’s before sending them to potential clients.

The fifth tip, especially if you are working for a non-start-up company, is to try to make your client make an offer, you could be surprised that they offer more than you wanted to ask. The worst that can happen is that you have to make a counter offer, if they think it’s too high, they would have thought that even if you had made the quote in the first place.

That’s it for now, I want to hear if you have specific questions or info you want to share!

New Release! Phony Phace Art Qit

Edit:I am no longer making or selling Art Qits due to other contractual obligations, but I’m leaving the post as is for continuity’s sake.

That’s it, I finally released my first Art assets package, it’s called the Phony Phace art Qit and here is the release text:

Phony Phace art Qit contains everything you need to develop an avatar builder module for your game, chat application or other software. Your players will create humorous, colourful avatars, representing themselves, someone they know, or even funny-looking freaks through a random function. As they build the images one feature at a time, with various styles and colours, they are creating something unique amongst literally billions of possibilities.

Let your players create, send and save avatars!

Phony Phace art Qit contains:

• 8 beards and mustaches
• 15 outfits
• 43 sets of eyes
• 8 pairs of glasses
• 6 hair accessories
• 36 hairdos
• 6 jaws
• 30 mouths
• Icons reprensenting the features and GUI assets
• Complete instructions with suggested alternate palettes, other palettes can be used or completely custom colors

Specifications:

• Humorous Avatar maker for male or female bust. 320×320, the resulting image can be resized.
• Small footprint, mobile compatible (721 kb for all graphics)
• At least 6599124000 possibilities (+ color variations)
• 151 different features
• Aliased transparent png 8kb format
• Complete instruction with suggested alternate palettes, other palettes can be used or completely custom colors
• great for chat systems, menu avatars or as stand alone

EDIT: This product is no longer for sale, but exceptions can be made, contact me if you are interested.

Race Kings

It’s always fun to have news from projects one has worked on in the past. Just a few weeks ago Joseph Flowers wrote to me about a game for which I have made some interface elements. These elements mostly have not been integrated in the project yet but it’s a work in progress with new gameplay elements being integrated regularly.

The project is Race Kings and it’s a round based auto theft and street racing game. The game is mostly a one man effort so you can register and try it out, the good thing is, Joseph will answer you himself if you make suggestion on the forum!

Congrats Joseph! Good work.

Logging your time! Why should you do that?

Why Log?

How profitable is your freelancing business? How much money do you make an hour? Do you get out of the whole thing with less money than you would have made flipping burgers?

There is only one way to know that, and it’s to log your time. There are other reasons to log your time,  since logging your time makes you more efficient at making quotes and it helps you figuring out where you lose your time. It may even help you make a clear difference between work time and fun time if you are like me and likely to think of work 24/7.

To make better quotes

The more logs you have, the more references you have when making a new quote. How much time did you spend on animation on your last project, how much on background tiles? You can use that to estimate the time you will spend on your next project. Of course, every once in a while you will get a project where you have to do things in a way you have never done before, but having a good number of logs will still help you putting a time and a price on these. Depending on how good you are with your logs you might even be able to estimate how much added time you get the first time you do something by comparing it to the following jobs you got.

To know how much money you are making

It’s when analysing your logs that you will also find out how much you make an hour, if you overcharged or if you undercharged on a project. You don’t have to wait until the project if finished either, keeping an eye on your log can tell you to get cracking or else you will finish losing money. Some people work better under pressure and pressure of losing money can (and should) be as much of an incentive as the pressure of making the deadline. If it makes you finish before the deadline, the more power to you, your client should be happy.

 To help make a difference between fun time and work time

It can go both way, really. Some freelancers, like me, have problems putting work aside, especially if their work and personal e-mails come in the same software or are on the same address. Others have the opposite problem, surfing the web, chatting and feeding the cats while they should be working (incidentally, it happens to me too.) Logging your time can help, if you have to “unlog” every time you want to reply to a personal e-mail or if you have to “log in” when you want to write a quote late at night when you should be relaxing, it makes you realise the difference between personal time and work time. It also gives you a better idea of how much you work, maybe you thought you were tight on money because you were undercharging, when in reality you were spending most of your day idling and wasting time.

Next article, how to log!