Designer Time Sucks: Part 2 of What Designers Do With Their Time

In the first article I discussed the extraordinary length of time it can take to find images, read the license agreement and “clean up” artwork for use on book covers.

Another major part of the designer’s job that people don’t consider to actually be part of the job, is communication. I’m just looking over the eMails I have in my client portfolios (I save all eMails from clients) and here are some rough figures: For a front cover the average number of eMails seems to be around 20. For a full spread (front, back and spine) it’s around 60. For clients who also require collateral items such as sell-sheets, bookmarks and business cards, it goes over 100.

Now, let’s just say it takes two minutes to read each eMail (in fact, it can take considerably longer if there are links to be checked and files to refer to), and another two minutes to respond. That’s four minutes for each communication. Even for a front cover only that’s more than an hour spent on eMails and for the larger projects it’s more than six hours, or the better part of the work day.

As you can see, between looking for the right images and communicating with the client, a designer can easily put in a two to 10 hours without any problem. And that’s without doing any actual work on the design itself.

 

THE ACTUAL DESIGN WORK

 
Let’s assume we have found the images and have a pretty good idea of what the client wants. It’s time to start the design work. This is where things can go smoothly…or not.

One common issue designers deal with is trying to keep color constant. Almost all images are provided to us in RGB colors (see article on color here). Unfortunately, a professionally-designed book cover needs to be in another color gamut, usually CMYK. Sometimes switching between CMYK and RGB causes no issues at all, but sometimes you see a drastic change in color and either have to have the client agree to the new colors, or play with the settings until the CMYK display and print samples look close to what you’re seeing on the screen with the RBG settings. Again, we’re talking an hour here…maybe a day to get it right. It’s one of those design holes that you can literally get swept into, and upon finishing think it’s still two o’clock in the afternoon, when in actual fact it’s after eight, supper has gone cold, the kids are in bed and the dog has peed on the floor waiting for you to walk him.

Why don’t agencies sell images in CMYK? Well, because RGB, or red, green, blue are colors that your computer screen and TV use to display images. RGB files are also quite a bit smaller than the CMYK files, so since you can’t see CMYK jpgs or tiffs online and the files are very large, it makes little sense for stock agencies to use this format.