First of all thanks for sharing this Jacob, and Harlan – wow! :)

I’ll throw in one of my ‘sad’ stories here to add to the pool. I was asked to design a logo for a restaurant, and I worked my ass off to make the deadline. The client even got a low-res file transferred to his phone so he could show his ‘friends and colleagues’. Well well.. my mistake was that I never spoke about the charges up front cuz this guy was sort of a friend.
So after two days he says, well the Pepsi guys are gonna give me a display board with our name for free so I was thinking I’ll go with it.
Fuck! What about my design??
Oh, I thought you do it as a HOBBY!

Talk about learning it the hard way, but a lesson well learnt! The only thing that keeps me cool is that he dint use my design anywhere, it would’ve been one hell of a rip-off!

PS: Nothing against Pepsi here.

Good luck everyone!

Cheers from Portugal,

Márcio Guerra

Ebi,
Please feel free. Doug Cloud has actually done it! Have fun ;)

Mandy & Maria,
See my comment to Kiren.

Jon,
The placements still happen here in Australia, but they only happen for short periods of time. Say 2-4 weeks. In fact, it’s compulsory for some students to do placement before graduation. Glad you got lucky!

When I were a lad startin’ out in this game over 20 years ago, the normal way of getting a job with an ad agency after leaving college was to do a placement.

What’s a placement? It’s when you do a fortnight’s work in an ad agency for free. You work on proper accounts, you put in the same time as everyone else and if they like your work they’ll offer you a job at the end of the two weeks.

Or offer you another placement….

I was one of the lucky ones, my book was good enough to land me a job pretty much straight away and relative to what other junior art directors were on at the time, I got paid a good wage.

But horror stories abounded of people on placements for six months or more, winning awards, generating profit for the agency but still not landing that all-important first job.

When the minimum wage was introduced in the UK ten to fifteen years ago, the agencies were up in arms: how can we afford to all the college leavers, they said. How can we keep our wonderful placement scheme going? It will be the end of the industry as we know it.

Yup, £5.10 per hour really was an outrageous rate to pay a college graduate back then, it was so good of the agencies to finally come on board with the scheme….

“Perfectionism is the enemy of good.”

There was a time – 7 years ago when I started out – when I would have easily accepted less than $5.00 (FREE) for work. The thing is, I got almost the same amount of “traffic” as i get now, but with more headache and worse an empty pocket. But alas there will always be whores…in every industry.

I agree with Kevin about being happy, it is a two sided coin but as Richard Branson says, “Have fun and the money will come”.

Why do people do this to creatives all the time?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lax0g5d6gM

“Getting paid the fair amount is something that a lot of creatives have to stand up for and in some cases, fight for.”

In regards to the demands, every industry has suffered losses through the internet, though they have also blossomed and improved in so many other ways!

Kevin,
I suppose it is about finding the right balance, but a happy client usually means a happy vendor.

Kiren,
That can also come down to being a perfectionist – even if the price is low, you just can’t let something go that is underpar. I think a lot of designers are like this.

Roger,
Thanks for the link to your article, you raise some valid points that reflect what these videos are really all about.

http://www.hybridcgi.com/?id=blog/007-you-get-what-you-paid-for

What’s the point of having a “happy” client if we’re miserable ourselves? You get what you pay for. If you don’t pay much, you don’t get much.

@Billie: Your video was also good but I think it’s more directed to people who are having this problem. Will a regular company understand the hint?