Design industry again belittled and insulted by journos and politicians
Designer Tom Muller earlier today linked on Twitter to a hateful Times article where Emily Gosden rips into the costs of graphic design and branding. This time, it’s the ‘NHS 60’ logo that’s under fire—the argument is that adding a couple of digits to the existing logo shouldn’t have cost £12,000. Yet again, an article in the mainstream press undermines the entire graphic design industry, without actually bothering to consider or research why the costs were as they were. God forbid that there’s anything more to design than ‘just doing it’. And, of course, Emily Gosden is presumably being paid about £3 per article for the Times, because as everyone knows, there’s no consideration or research behind writing—you ‘just do it’, right, Emily?
Tory MP Greg Hands also can’t resist having a pop at the designer scum who clearly ripped off tax payers (unlike London-based Hands himself, whose £300,000 of expenses—including £5,524 for ‘London Supplement’—were clearly all absolutely essential); he says: “Surely adding two digits doesn’t need to be outsourced at all. Civil servants can do this themselves. Modern graphic design packages surely allow anyone with an average brain to design something as good as, or better than, what we see in front of us here.”
Oh, really? Well, this blog likes to go the extra mile itself (and for the staggering fee of nothing at all), and so here’s what would have happened had Hands got his way:
The final brand: smart, stylish, and it probably went through 11 billion revisions to get to this stage, hence the £12,000 fee.
What would have happened if you’d armed a civil servant with Photoshop and told them to create the logo. And you wouldn’t have gotten any actual branding advice and alternative versions of the logo for print/web, and so on.
a) Emily Gosden probably does write stuff without doing research first.
b) That logo isn’t worth £12k, but that’s the fault of the person paying the bill, not the person who drew it.
Surely the issue is more about whether it was money well spent – I don’t recall seeing the logo anywhere during the last year. I do agree that it made sense to use a proper designer though, and that level of fee seems very reasonable to me for a PROFESSIONAL.
Heh. I can never decide whether it’s depressing or hilarious that people think Graphic Designers are just the monkeys with the right software and don’t, for example, have a wealth of knowledge and experience in their field.
I thought that the Times and the Tories supported outsourcing everything to the private sector because it was more efficient and value for money? They would certainly be the first to bitch if civil servants were sitting around playing with Photoshop.