Lots of professional designers renounce the idea of billing by the hour simply because in practice, it would be impossible to figure out. How would you begin to count the actual hours that went in to any given design without counting the years of experience that led up to that point?
One of my favorite quotes related to this idea comes from Pablo Picasso. He said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” In this quote, Picasso points out that he was able to learn an existing technique, to work to a pre-planned outcome, (however amazing) in a relatively short, but finite amount of time. The outcome might be quite amazing, but it wasn’t innovation, instead it was a deliberate practice technique he used to build a specific skill, to gain experience that would become part of his own constitution.
He also points out that to learn how to paint in his own voice is the accumulation of everything he’s ever done or experienced including learning techniques such as replicating Raphael’s particular style. To me anyway, he’s saying that each painting he makes that is uniquely Picasso, is created entirely from the cumulative experience of actually being Picasso. It is creating something entirely unique from his own special blend, not the time it took to put that bit of paint on the canvas.
Is his painting worth only the number of hours multiplied by an arbitrary dollar amount assigned to the portion of the day it took to apply the paint? That model assumes that time is the only factor, the only thing of value in the equation, but is deeply flawed. It did not take a couple of hours to create the painting, it took a lifetime to get to the point of being able to apply that paint. What about those hours?
If we relate this back to graphic design more specifically, we could look at logo design. The actual drawing, sometimes barely a doodle, that gets digitized into a final logo, for example, may have only taken two minutes to draw and an hour or less to digitize. Should the client be billed for 75 minutes of work? Sure, it’s more than likely that that designer logged some hours doing research on their client, the company, and the audience that might add a few extra hours onto the bill, but what of the years of experience that designer has accumulated that allowed for the clarity of thought and the knowhow for creating a powerful and effective identity? What about the value of the identity to the client? Should that not be considered as part of the equation?
The legendary designer and Pentagram partner, Paula Scher, has now become infamous for her 1998 one-second napkin drawing of the CitiBank logo. Following a meeting with her client, CitiBank, she quickly sketched on a napkin what was to become the now well recognized CitiBrank umbrella. When questioned why a huge corporation should put any trust into a one-second idea, she aptly responded, “It’s a second done in 34 years.” Here, she very aptly make the point that this is not the result of one-second of her time and attention, but the cumulative of a 34 year design career. Without all those years and experience, she wouldn’t have been able to do what she did.
I understand that Pablo Picasso and Paula Scher both represent a special sort of genius, but we all share in that we are a collection of our own experiences. We need to learn from our great’s ability to recognize their value, where it comes from, and what it is worth. It likely isn’t fair for anyone of us to only charge for the sheer number of minutes we spent on the singular task without at least considering what allowed for those few minutes to be spent so efficiently.