Today I was interviewed by a student at the Art Institute of Seattle about Design Kompany’s pricing and process.
AS: What is a reasonable timeline for your projects? How do you handle taking longer than originally agreed, whether your fault or your clients’?
DK: One to three months. We create a work plan schedule up front, so both our clients and our Design Kompany team members are clear about expectations, scope, and timeline. Our work plan allows enough buffer for unforeseen extensions; because they’ll undoubtedly pop up and we’ve learned to budget time for them.
AS: What is your appropriate process?
DK: Our process involves starting right before the start*. That means getting to the big-picture step of figuring out what it is our client is doing with the new brand, why, and who for. Lots of times people call us because they need a new website, but the products are the final steps in the brand identity design process. We start with sideways questions like, “If your brand were a person, where would she hang out on Saturday morning?” Asking questions to flesh out a brand’s personality really helps clarify what the final image need to be.
There’s an added benefit: being certain up front about the messaging makes it easy to cut out conceptual ideas that would obviously not work. In so doing, we can clear our mental canvas to zoom in acutely on just ideas that fit.
Design is also as much about creating as it is about editing–paring down the essence of an idea and solving a problem with elegance and efficiency. I really believe this. I think that’s why people call our work “minimalist” and “modern,” which I really didn’t plan on when we started doing poster designs at North Carolina State University in the late 1990s. But getting labeled teaches you, and upon hearing we were minimalists, I decided to ramble about in Scandinavia–the heart of modern design–and see. This was different from the minimalism I’d lived within during my year or two in Kyoto and Tokyo, but still, the style was clean. I felt immediately at home.
I really believe the architect Louis Sullivan’s decree, “Form follows function.” I guess that’s why many of our clients have been architects!
More about how we work >
*I wrote a bit about starting before you start in this post about naming: Superman’s crystals and the a-ha of finding your company name
AS: How do you correct pricing of your project or any allowance for inexperience?
DK: It depends. We like to involve our interns and give them a wide berth to be creative. So if a client is willing to work with our interns, they’ll get a break on our usual pricing. This decision is made at the time of quoting a new project.
AS: What is your proper scheduling of payments?
DK: Not sure what you mean by “proper,” but here’s how it works. We start with an engagement fee, due at our first work meeting. A second payment is due midway, and the final upon completion of finished designs.
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