Cognizant Designs LLC

Show me the money

Freelance has a lot of interesting barriers to overcome. First you have to find a client, then you must determine what the scope of work will be, then you must determine the price for your work and when all is said and done you have to COLLECT!

It seems like, even when you agree to something with your client,  you may encounter some last minute changes in schedule that weren’t apart of the original deal. Namely, they don’t want to finish paying you because they think that they don’t need to pay you for your work. They don’t remember negotiating your rate, or asking you to perform the work in an unreasonably short amount of time. I’m almost convinced that they don’t care. They used you for what they wanted to accomplish and now suddenly they want out of the deal.

No matter how fairly you have treated someone, they want to take their guarantee back.

So here is how everything happened;

1. A gentleman asked me to create a WordPress theme in one day for a client of his
2. He agrees, after many back and forth conversations, to the price for the work
3. I complete the work that I could do, and even generated artwork to complete the design
4. I am on call as a consultant modifying theme settings and php templates
5. I send the final payment for the other half of what the total job was priced
6. Customer says that he is waiting for his client to pay him
7. I politely tell him that this is not my problem
8. He doesn’t agree

From my perspective, if you have hired me to do something and you agree to pay a certain price then it doesn’t matter to me what other arrangements you have regarding the same project. I am willing to go a little bit for people, but if you have agreed to pay me for my time, you had better follow through without any condition attached.

I will keep you posted as to whether or not he actually follows through.

Thanks for letting me complain a bit,

Zach “the unpaid” Freelancer

Marshall Mcluhan

A godfather to the ideas of digital communication and information surfing is Marshall McLuhan. While I was studying communications in college I found myself totally enthralled by McLuhan’s book “The Medium is The Mesage.” After watching him debate other intellectuals of his time it was clear that his premise would be an important thing to review and study as someone who wants to communicate online.

The idea that my words, images, videos and websites would become a medium by which others learn and interact with me would be something that McLuhan would adopt if he were alive today. It’s amazing to think that McLuhan advocated TV’s in the class room and discussed the idea that in a few years books would be an antiquated form of research and reference because visual learning is so much faster and effective. I personally don’t think that we will ever eliminate books as a form of communication or record keeping. The instability of digital memory is far to great to ever totally eliminate paper records of information.

Reading this book is a good way for designers and developers to get an honest idea of what this communication medium should be doing.

Let me know what you think,

Zach “attack” Meyer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Moving and Improving

Attention followers of our blog, we moved!

On Friday September 11th we had an opportunity to finally start transitioning away from the old single page site and allow WordPress to do all of the heavy lifting from now on. Or at least until something flashier and faster comes along to replace it.

There is sort of a strange paradigm in web development and design, you have time to work for everyone accept yourself. This issue often causes company websites to sort of languish in a mire of never progressive soup. Great examples of people who don’t upgrade and don’t really care are cameronmoll and happycog. Both represent amazing minds in the web community and neither one has really changed the theme of their websites in well over 3 years.

This constant self-deprecation can be a sweet kiss of death for many companies. I can personally attest to my constant busy-ness as being the primary cause for my lack of change to the core site. I sincerely wish that I had more time to develop the ideas that have to a slightly more inviting polish. But perhaps my recent move from spineless entrepreneur to full-time web wrangler will grant me some real time to brush my site up.

The other part of the web that is always chasing me is the feeling that my best work is done for clients and not for me. It always feels like my concepts for other people are more well rounded than what I end up assembling for myself. I know that I have a hundred good ideas a day but they are always for others. Perhaps it is my future to be a muse for others and never for myself.

Thank you all for coming by and reading my white noise from time to time.