Design Critique for Fun and Profit

Never charge by the hour.

I don’t want to live my life thinking about the price of a minute, or being distracted by the clock as I try to solve a hard problem. In my first Crit, the two hour crunch made me feel like I was forced to compromise the quality of the final artifact. I chose to go way over time and spent 6 hours on that first project. The extra time helped me end up with a result that I can stand behind.

I should have omitted the “two hours” line completely in my tweet. The right move is to charge for the value being delivered. Businesses pay for outcomes and designers shouldn’t be punished for being fast.

What I found is that people dramatically overthink how hard it is to spin up a consulting service. But in my limited experience, the demand is there, and more people should try it.

In fact, I suspect that this micro-consulting model might actually be very attractive to startups and fast-growing businesses. Imagine the 4-hour accessibility audit, or the 6-hour icon system, or the 2-hour copywriting review — specialist designers could dominate niches

Design is more than the visuals, they say. It’s a holistic process, requiring deep thought about why things should exist, how products should work, what kind of customers need this, who will pay for it, and on and on. Visual design? That’s just polish, pretty pixels that aren’t delivering business value.

But you know what, it turns out that sometimes people just want their product to look good. And it turns out that profitable businesses sometimes just want someone to point out the tiny pixel bugs, the misalignments and misplaced typography, and not get bogged down in multi-week contracts that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Related to the above point about not charging by the hour, designers seem to consistently underestimate what “a lot of money” is to a well-run and profitable business. I talked to friends and asked about their company's policy of expensing contract work. Some told me that they don’t need any approval for expenses under $5-10k. To companies making millions of dollars per year, a consultant who can move their needle by even a tiny amount is worth thousands of dollars and not a second thought.