Last month I was approcah by a fellow member of my local masjid, he explained that my services were recommended to him and he invited me to do some work for him.
We planned a meeting early October (a very busy period for me), firstly he was very late and left me hanging around for quite some time, not good! When he did arrive, he laid out the brief, package design for sweets etc.... but first requested I come up with a design for their brand 'BIG MOUTH'. ok fair enough....
When the subject of costs arised he pulled out the oldest line in the book "shoe string budget" and that "a friend is helping us probono!" Therefore to capture his buisness I offered to 'knock out a few idea's' prior to development so that he could choose who he wanted to go with and that payment can begin in the development stages.
I worked on a couple of ideas, all requireing development blah blah blah, but then I was working for free so I was only going to show concept proposals!
Boy did I get the wrong idea....
I received an email a few days after my submission, from this email I found of that I was infact bidding on the project? Against not 1 person but 100's....
If fact what the client did was go onto 1 of those websites that provides hundreds of designs where the client picks 1 and only pays the 'winner'. These kind of websites take the piss.... we designers should not have to provide work for free for the prospect of possible payment. It devalues our work and makes our profession worthless, infact I'm better of working in a retail shop than design this way!
In the end the client hated my work saying it was unoriginal and under-developed when compared with other submissions! Well I disagree with unoriginal if you considered the 'other submissions', and under-developed... well durrr what did this guy expect.
well rant over...
Well here are my unoriginal and under-developed proposals.....
Working with people like this, makes me believe that design is not the way forward for me....
assalamu alaikum
