Small Time -vs- 9-5 Design! Part 2
// April 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // Web
The jury is out regarding education but I can tell you that at the last design firm I worked at the “art director” graduated from an online university, one I hadn’t heard of before. And she even made a note to tell me that she graduated Summa Cum Laude. No Comment.
From what I have gathered in the trenches of the cubicle, as far as new technology and continuing education with 9-5 design firms. There isn’t any!! The designers and developers that work there usually knew their craft very well when they started. But they remain stagnant after assuming the position. Imagine 8 hours of irrelevant emails, meetings where the sales guy rambles forever, topped off with some dirty office politics, are you really going to be excited about learning new things related to your job? Probably not. 9-5′ers don’t learn anything new. That is until the market…oops, I mean boss demands it, and by that time they are way behind the curve!
When design shops open up they devise a system of one size fits all for e-commerce, content management, and web design. They stick with that system for years. And in the web world…those might as well be dog years because technologies rapidly evolve and die. Yet average consumers are oblivious to this. The fact is you may have a graphic designer creating your website. That may very well be O.K. Until you want that same website Search Engine Optimized and all your content is positioned in tables instead of DIV tags. I watched this go on at larger firms. Correct techniques were written off as taking to long.
The moral of the post….Research what your getting into and talk to many “web people” as you can. Who is trying to sell you and who is telling you real information? Who is relying on name recognition (e.g. Microsoft) and who is showing you functional design and code? Who will take the time to understand what you are looking for, and who will tell you that your maximum number of revisions are up?
You can enjoy a great personal experience with a seasoned freelancer or take your chances with a 9-5er.
Another way to put it…Some people prefer local restaurants, and some people prefer national chains.
Alex A.