brunobergher::blog

I have been thinking and discussing with friends for quite some time on how design (and specially visual design) is mostly an income-limited activity (e.g. your income is directly proportional to the time you spend working). I found via 32Signals’ SvN this post by Derek Silvers that explains the notion more in depth.

The article is focused towards the music business, as it is the main subject of that blog, but it can certainly give some insights to the design crowd. Of course that, differently from the hands-on massage example Derek suggests, designers can have a variable income-to-time ration, depending on a series of variants such as briefing clarity, collaboration with clients and co-workers and, we have to admit, inspiration.

37Signals themselves remodeled their business model to accommodate the kind of ‘while you sleep‘ earnings that Silvers talks about, but that did so by becoming a software company with design DNA. Not every web design firm can do that, nonetheless graphic design shops that have nothing to do with software development.

And this it the notion that I have been so interested in: how can a designer/small firm create a framework for continuous earnings from the same effort? So far I have only considered these three options:

Writing a design blog and putting up ads

This can, in the long run, amount to some good money, but is somewhat unstable, requires quite some time to build up and is in fact something outside the core activity of design, since it depends on the person’s skills as a writer.

And I’m dismayed by how designers frequently can’t write squat, even about their day-to-day activity. (Not that I am any good at it.)

Selling your pieces

Perhaps someone else can enjoy that neat poster your created just for yourself, or you may like to exercise your own personal style in ‘clientless’ compositions. Printing these out in some very high quality process can turn them into very marketable products and work as either decoration or art.

I have seen also t-shirts as very nice media for this kind of work, as Brazil had quite a boom of t-shirt designers in recent years (Camiseteria being a very popular spot).

On top of that, the visual thinking skill set often comes with some manual ability as a bonus. It’s not rare to find designers that can actually build stuff they design. This can mean painting, sculpting or any other way of bringing to reality something from your imagination.

These can be sold in some traditional way or maybe in websites such as Etsy, which seems to do a very nice job (they have cool visualization options, though only a few are actually useful).

Design something reusable and earn royalties

There’s a big market out there to reusable design bits, such as generic illustrations, symbols or templates. These can be quite offensive to some designers—design work should be specific for a given purpose, not some one-size-fits-all solution—but can probably become quite a profit source. Because you’d be actually multiplying the income from something you would have worked on only once.

There’s a huge number of websites where to sell this kind of work, the first that comes to mind being Deviant Art.

Summing up

These can be some nice alternatives, but I’m not satisfied with these so far, and hope I can come up with some more ways of repeatable ways to ear money ‘while you sleep’.

A friend sent me today a link to the just-redesigned website of Boston, Massachusetts base advertising agency Modernista.

All of the content of their website is actually off-site: text in Wikipedia, videos in You Tube, stills in flickr; the site is just a tiny red JavaScript-based menu with an iframe behind it.

Creative director Gary Koepke says in an interview to Creativity:

“There’s such a challenge for ad agencies to be known as digitally savvy and understand what’s going on the medium. We wanted to prove to people that we understand a way that we can have a transparent, open source and highly successful site.”

Well, I think they nailed it.

This approach has at least two great qualities:

• It absolutely expresses how up-to-date the company is, not in terms of visual communication (which should be a commodity in their playing field), but in respect to deeply understanding the way information finds it’s way around nowadays and how open to comments and participation any enterprise must be to succeed in this community-driven world.
• This is a unique solution to their problem, which can’t quite be ‘borrowed’ or ‘be of inspiration’ to the competition. I mean: there’s nothing that can be similar to it: it’ll be either exactly the same or something entirely different. Anything in the middle would be seen as a blatant rip-off. Achieving this in an environment in which stuff is copied all over fast and easily is quite an accomplishment.

I look forward to see how this echoes around the web.

Matt at signal vs. noise noted the sliding images that explain how the Beanstalk, a hosted Subversion system, works.

I find that interesting, but what really caught my attention was the simplicity of the sign-up process: they only offer you the option of signing up for a free account. That way you don’t feel that the service is being sold to you, but rather that they’re offering you an opportunity to enjoy something good.

THAT is user-friendliness and inviting for business, because we have to be realistic: there’s no way someone is going to choose a paid option without checking out the free one first, standing right next to it.