Tonight I was negotiating fees with an illustrator for reproduction rights of our upcoming icons and title screens. She quoted numbers from the Graphic Artists Guild, which has the website address gag.org, which is kinda funny. My family business was an advertising agency, so I know how creative folk usually charge for logos, graphic design, and illustrations. They first size you up and try to determine how much money you're gonna make, then charge accordingly. As tonight's illustrator put it, it's not fair to her if she gets the same amount for a Times Square billboard illustration as for a local newspaper cartoon.

I can see her point, but I fundamentally disagree with the approach. The way I figure it, my time is worth X per hour, and my value is usually proportional to the number of hours I spend, but not always. I've actually charged companies $300 for a logo design, simply because we had a great initial idea and it only took us a few hours to do it. I know of practically no one in the advertising field that would charge a straight hourly rate like this, but it happens in software consulting all the time.

I'd love to know how visual artists managed to pull off a sliding rate standard, when other industries, like software, are actually more nebulous in terms of cost to benefit ratio. I could have a software design idea that saves a company literally tens of thousands of dollars, but in most work-for-hire arrangements, they'd only have to pay me for my time. Why is a graphic designer's work more intrinsically beneficial to the outcome than a software designer's efforts? If my developers charged me on a sliding scale according to the ideas they came up with, or how we used them, I'd go nuts. "Oh, you're doing web services? For IBM? I want triple my rate." My answer would be "Screw you" and I'd call the next guy.

Now, don't get me wrong, I do charge a higher rate for corporate clients than local small businesses, but I don't vary things based on project potential. The way I see it, they're buying a slice of my time, which has a certain price. What they're able to do with me has more to do with their side than mine.

Look at it this way. When I worked at Lotus, I was drawing a salary, so I was effectively earning an hourly rate. While there, my group got to work on Lotus Notes/Domino R5, IBM's flagship product at the time. I'm sure IBM made lots and lots of money from Notes, a small portion of which was because of me. We also worked on a demo that never went anywhere, and so it made IBM no money. (Interesting historical note, the demo did score an IANA port number. Look in your services file for lotusmtap.)

Should I have been paid more for the days I worked on Notes than for the days I worked on the demo? Was I paid in fair proportion to my role in Notes profits? Of course not. They just paid me for my time. The fact they could use me effectively had much more to do with the existing Lotus/IBM infrastructure than my own personal talents.

Same thing with new business ventures. A designer makes a logo, and while it definitely plays a part in the success of the business, it's just a piece of a much larger whole, most of which has nothing to do with the designer. The entrepreneurs are the ones with the idea. They're the ones who find the funding. They're the ones who take the risk. I mean, imagine if my accountant charged me in proportion to the amount of taxes he was able to save me! It's crazy.

Over the years, my company has designed and developed whole products for several entrepreneurs. Some have succeeded, some have not. Should I refund my money to the ones that failed? Should I go back and get more money for the ones that took off? No way. But this is what creative freelancers are doing when they apply their sliding scale. They're saying, "This will cost more because it might make more money."

Ah well, they usually get their way, because it's the way things are done. Maybe we should borrow a page from them and create the Software Artists Guild (SAG) to publish rate books with entries like "simple dialog box ($500/$1000/$1500)" and "RDF query ($800/$1200/$1800)". I'm not sure I'd end up with more money, but at least I could toss my stopwatch away.