Cut Cost Cutting Corners Candidly
“The photo looks fine, it’s not the best, but it will work for now.”
“The writing isn’t the best, but we’re in an industry where it doesn’t matter.”
“We’re programmers, not designers. It doesn’t matter.”
“We’re designers, not programmers, so we can just use an off the shelf product.”
“I’ll buy a design off of Template Monster.”
“We just had some quick business cards made at Kinko’s.”
Cutting corners is an okay thing to do every blue moon. But we often meet people who cut corners everywhere. It adds up fast. What are some ways you see your customers or colleagues cutting corners?
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I didn’t want to pay the hundreds of dollars it usually takes to get business cards professionally printed so I decided to use PSPrint for 250 cards. I also elected to not view a proof because it cost more and I figured they couldn’t mess up my simple design. Then it came back to bite me in the butt when I got the cards in the mail today. One of the elements in my design had been changed from tan to dark blue and the cropping job was horrendous. I’d be too embarrassed to pass them out, so it’s basically a waste of about $50.
I hate using Template Monster… to think that there may be another site out there with my exact design really bothers me. But thats just part of my incessant and annal retentive design patterns.
I’ll very much suggest looking at the templates for ideas and color schemes, but hey, I’m an artist! I feel like I’m cheating myself if I use a template.
I want creativity ~ I thrive in it…
Um…I dont do my taxes…yet
Probably not something commonly referred to a cutting a corner…but I think there are too many companies out there who lean to hard on researching the “best practices” of a particular thing instead of coming up with a unique solution that best fits their situation.
I believe there is a place for practicing best practice techniques, but I also believe far too many organizations use it as a crutch. This is especially true when the final solution (after the budget of time, money and scope has been blown) reflects only a nasty mishmash of the practices of others.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of business that still see their website and just something they ‘have’ to have because everyone else has one. They don’t understand the power of the dark side!
Man, there’s a lotta guys called Mark on this blog…
My boss has a habit of just ‘making-do’ so that we can get the job done faster… bad content, terrible hacks, copies of copies of copies… and it usually ends up coming back to bite us in the ass and guess who has the lovely job of retrofitting…
Hey MarkB, how long are you in town for? Do you want to get coffee this weekend?
Hey Chris
I’m outta here on Saturday sparrows fart – 6:30am.
But I’m going with a bunch of people that I’ve met whilst I been here on Saturday to a rocking little place in Tempe called “The Big Bang”… you know it?
Why don’t u bring some friends and come have a beer? We’ll be there from 9ish.