Guy has a fulltime job, but his dream is to someday run his own sign business. He recently invested in a CNC Router and is in the process of designing a logo for his new business. When he passed his preliminary design around on chat one night, I asked him if he was open for suggestion.
After more discussion, Guy voluntered to allow us to take his current design "back to the drawing board" and redesign it.

This is a good chance to jumpstart the Design/Cost Forum. This forum was inspired by the popular Design/Cost Workshop in SignCraft Magazine. Our goal is take a design and redesign it using basic layout principles such as those talked about in Mike Steven's Mastering Layout book. This might be an existing design or a fantasy project.

It's important that we explain in detail why each design makeover is in fact better. Is there more negative space? Is your typeface choice more appropriate? Why? We need to know every step of the design process that you employed. At the end of the day, we need to learn some design basics that we can use to troubleshoot all our layouts.

It's always interesting to learn what others would charge for the project in question, but here again, I am more interested in how others arrive at their price. It's important that we teach each other how to determine our individual hourly shop rates, as well as markup.

Those interested in participating in this project will find everything needed to get started in The Design/Cost Forum. Here's a direct link to the project. Special thanks to Guy for having the courage to allow us to take his logo design "back to the drawing board."

Anyone else?

[ February 11, 2002: Message edited by: Janette Balogh ]