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The new site for Home Theater Solutions is officially live at http://www.hometheatersolutions.co. This marks a major milestone with the company’s fresh start with a new name and identity. The home theater professionals in Charlotte, North Carolina can now better inform their current and potential customers with a site full of information: services they provides, packages included, and even information on what they do so consumers can be better informed about home theaters in general.

To view more of the project and all that’s developed so far, check out the project in the Folio here.

The site was built in conjunction with Jamie from Dusted Design, who had taken care of the web development for the project. Dusted in general is full of a great group of people. If you’re a fan of a solid creative group and British accents, check out their site at http://www.dusted.co.

Recently, there was an article by Christopher Gregorio concerning advice on hiring artist and creatives for work in the world of web and software development. Whether directed towards developers in a vernacular misunderstood by artists and designers or honestly directed to piss off these professionals, the article has earned its fair share of commentary. You can find the original article at http://kaitol.com/how-to-hire-an-artist/. Here are my thoughts on the subject.

I’ve heard this argument before by both potential clients and miscellaneous well-educated people who simply misunderstand what goes into the work of a creative. There’s a huge gap between us professionals providing a service and explaining what makes up our pricing for others to understand. Essentially, it’s much like the pricing of any other professional. An average employee with a salary $50,000 annually comes to about $24 per hour. This excludes what’s taken out for taxes, any benefits that may be included in their employment, and other perks. Artists and designers often start at this point at the beginning of their career because it’s a great platform to jump off of.

Self-employed professionals find that there’s many more included expenses for working on their own than the above elements. Added taxes for self-employment, expenses (stock elements, software, licenses, random office supplies) need to be included in their hour rate so that they can cover both business and home costs. Besides, who on Earth would want to hire a professional risking themselves financially with sub-par tools? Putting everything into account typically raises hourly rates to $35, a number I very commonly see coming from other creatives.

There’s also the account of intellectual property. Developers don’t sell their apps, games, and programs; they sell the license to use them. This is equivalent to a designer or artist. Something, which seems intangible, has property value. Designers and artists account for this because they know handing their work away means it’s gone forever.

For the matter of payments: I’ve worked with practically all methods and have come to the conclusion of one system that truly works. I take the principle amount and break it up into payments through work phases. For example: a particular website project for $3000. The first payment of $1000 starts the project off and begins the design phase. When the design is approved, the second payment of $1000 is required. There’s an equal trade of payment and design. Lastly, the site is developed and payment is due on the launch of the site. While this is pretty simplistic, it’s how I tend to do work. I can absolutely understand Christopher’s concern as clients can sometimes conveniently bail on a project. The point is that it happens to everyone, and multiple “checkpoints” can be extremely proactive and functional for everyone involved.

Lastly, we all need to remember that everyone, when hoping to come off as professional, needs to act professional. It’s perfectly fine to be ignorant in things you’re not wrapped up in everyday. But I do invite Christopher to consider looking into it more and asking around for the best solution before rejecting the value of other professionals’ work. We all need to get paid.

For Christopher directly, feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk about it. I have no problem meeting in the middle to see what works for you and let you knwo what works best for designers. Hope this fills in folks for a long-standing argument I hope we can eventually settle through talking.

Keeping everyone informed, I'll be running shop a bit slower than normal for the next few days. The primary work machine is currently in the shop, so I'll be working from another machine while it's being worked on. Thanks for your patience for anyone who might not have hear from me for about a day, but email and instant messaging is now back up and running.

For a few months now, I’ve been tinkering around with the idea of doing a few different posters series. I’ve been working on one in particular as a challenge to myself to make something intangible into a visual form. I started throwing around the idea of designing posters to express mental disorders with basic shapes and colors arranged in ways to express them. After that, I decided the first to be focused on was Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Some details on what’s developed thus far

The style’s very much a throwback to a retro age (including liberal use of grain and general wear) and I’m working hard to focus on information and info graphics. I’m loving where it’s at so far and can’t wait to add onto it.

I’ve just added a quick update to the site to provide controls for all of the slideshows in the Folio. These slideshows automatically thumb through all of the available pictures, yet clicking one of the two arrows halts the slideshow so you can manually browse.

There’ll be more small updates like the along the way, depending on the needs that crop up. Enjoy!