Earlier today I got severely undercut on a design job bid by a competitor who is already notorious in the (admittedly small) world of horror/haunt designers for doing that sort of thing. I can live with being undercut; that’s just a fact of life. What concerned me was the amount by which he undercut me – fully half of what I bid, which was reasonable from the beginning.

Then, just now, I heard on a podcast that another newcomer genre competitor is offering a full suite of design services through the end of the year for a preposterously low price.

So I’m pissed off, and not because there are people offering the same services I offer for less money – that’ll always be the case. I have a level of knowledge and experience at this point that no discounts or marketing ballyhoo by would-be competitors can touch. I do solid work and I stand by it.

What I can’t fathom is how short-sighted this whole doing-the-work-for-way-less-than-it’s-worth approach is. It’s beyond naive. The prices I’m hearing are clearly intended to do two things (as near as I can figure): First, get the work. Second, make sure nobody else gets the work. For somebody trying to make a name for themselves and build a smallish portfolio, I get it. You grab whatever jobs you can, even if you’re effectively working for free, so that you can build the book and client list.

Problem is, these prices aren’t reasonable (for the designer) or realistic (for the market). Sooner or later, both of these guys are going to need to start charging what the work is actually worth, and that’s when they’ll realize (too late, of course) that they’ve trained their clients to expect graphic/web design work for virtually no money. And this benefits… who? How?

Picture it like this: You have a hot dog stand on a street corner, and you’ve had it for 20 years. You charge $1.00 per dog. You have to pay the city a license to sell your dogs, you have to buy the dogs, buns, mustard, etc., and you have to pay yourself a salary for standing on your corner selling the dogs for 8 hours a day. So, the price of your hot dog, given all that, is more than reasonable.

Then a new guy sets up a hot dog stand across the street, and he’s only charging 10 cents for his hot dogs. Now, you know, for a fact, that he’s only doing it to attract new customers (including yours). You also know that charging 10 cents per dog means he’s losing money on every dog he sells, which means he can’t possibly maintain that price indefinitely. So in the short term, he might get all the customers, but after a point he’s going to have to charge what those dogs are worth (or go out of business), and by then everybody’s going to be used to spending 10 cents on a hot dog. So where does that leave every hot dog vendor in the city?

Those of us who do this professionally and maintain a realistic pricing menu have to contend with these guys muddying the waters and creating ridiculously unrealistic expectations within the marketplace. I charge roughly half of what I’m worth for the work I do because I want to do it for people who don’t have a ton of money. That’s a choice I made when I decided to specialize in horror, Halloween and haunted attraction visual design, and one I’ve never regretted. I can only hope these guys will come to their senses and stop what is, ultimately, an incredibly destructive tactic.

The bottom line: When you sell something for less than it’s worth, you devalue it. Period.

It occurred to me recently that I’ve been doing illustration work off and on for over 20 years, and that I have stacks of artwork  published once, often in extremely obscure publications, that’s been sitting in a drawer ever since. As a regular user of royalty-free stock image sites, I thought to myself “Self, here’s a great way to earn some passive income for those lean months right after Halloween. You even have most of that stuff scanned into your computer!”

So I set about doing research to find out what’s involved in selling one’s backlog of illustrations online, and as it turns out, the internet isn’t as evolved as we often like to credit it. Oh sure, if you’re a photographer, Flash animator, icon or theme developer, no problem. If you create all your artwork on the computer, you can start selling tomorrow. But if you create traditional illustrations (that is to say, using ink or paint), there’s this weird attitude involved and you find yourself on sites talking about their “exclusive” list of “top notch” illustrators, complete with bullshit application processes and unreasonable licensing/exclusivity terms. There’s no middle ground between the two (at least, none that I’ve been able to find yet).

And honestly, I don’t get it. How are these sell-your-own-creatives stock sites ignoring an entire class of illustration work? And what’s with the attitude on the illustration-only stock sites? What, because it’s “art”? Shouldn’t the creators get to determine how their work is classified? I’ve never stood on ceremony about my own work and have always considered myself an illustrator first, and all the commercial/mercenary implications that go with that title (as opposed to “artist”). If I want to sell old images on the cheap to somebody that could use them, well, I don’t mind saying that I’m a bit miffed to find that I can’t. Or, at least, I can’t without jumping through some serious hoops that my fellow visual designers don’t have to jump through.

Stock sites – get with the program. Some of us draw and paint, and know how to scan at high resolution. Some of us would like to sell a 15-year-old drawing of a vampire to a kid for $20 to use on his college newsletter. Some of us would be happy to give you a percentage of that…

…and hey, got a bead on a stock art site that does what I’m talking about? Leave it in the comments!

Desktop PCs have been a regular part of life for over a decade, yet manufacturers still build them as if nobody will ever need to access their innards. I am literally having to completely deconstruct my dead HP Pavillion to get to the hard drive. This is ridiculous.