A guide to the WORK OFFERS FORUM


Hello dear deviants:

I have been working with commissions here, on DA, for over a year, and as many other artists I started by looking for offers in the work forum.

In this time I gained a lot of experience in this particular section of DA, and I want to share it by giving you some essential tips to follow:


1.Never, ever accept “EXPOSURE” as a payment.

Some people will ask for logos and other sort of complicated (many hours of work) stuff. Their payment offer will be quite low, and to make you feel better about it, they will assure you that your work will get lots of exposure in their site. Now, ask yourself, how will that exposure do you some good? Will people know that you made the logo/banner/animation? Of course not. The best reputation you can get is the one of being a good honest commission artist, accepting exposure as a payment is not professional at all, and I warn you, is a common SCAM to pay less for more.


2. Don’t join work forum “CONTESTS”

Sometimes you will find that a guy offers a juicy amount, like $400, for a logo for his site/company/t-shirt…. etc. The offer sounds great, doesn’t it? But he offers $400 to the BEST design. Don’t let yourself to get caught in this SCAM. That person will get 10, or 12 free designs in different styles, and he will probably won’t pay any artist. And even if he does, many artists will work for him for nothing!. This is not how professional contracts are done. Stay away from these “contests”.


3.Do not offer free samples.

You have a gallery, don’t you? Don’t you offer enough samples there?
My personal experience of people who wants free samples is that 9 from each 10 will take your sample and never reply you again. Don’t work for free. If they want a sample sketch, they must pay for it.

4. Be careful with the big projects:

Some people will look for an artist for a webcomic or a graphic novel… or big stuff like that. They will offer big amounts of money for that work, but, be very careful. This kind of offer we are talking about it’s a professional freelance contract. $1000 for 40 colored comic pages is simply ridiculous.

That means that he intends to pay you $25 per page, which will take you about 5 or 6 hours (in case you are very fast) to get done.

Let’s do some numbers here:

$1000 / 40 =25 per page 1 page may take you 6 hours of work, so you will be paid $4,16 per hour.

That, if the page pleases him at the first attempt, imagine that you have to repeat some pages, then your salary will get divided by 2 each time you restart the work.

So it will be $2 dollars per hour for a project, that is not yours, and that will take a total of 240 hours of work.

Working 8 hours per day, it will take you 30 days to complete this project, working on weekends too, of course.

Just for you to know, MC Donalds trainees get $7 per hour minimum, and they get at least one free day per week,and in some countries, they have health insurance included in the job.


If we add to this offer that you probably won’t get the copyright of your own work, this thing starts to sound a lot… like slavery? Well, if you arrived to this conclusion then BRAVO, because it is exactly that!


5. About payment in function of profit.

If you take a job, in which your payment will consist in a fraction of the profits, you probably will never see a dollar.



A GUIDE TO PRICES:

One of the most useful facts I learned for the work offer forum is the real value on the market of certain jobs.

This will help you to set a fair price and also to know if someone is trying to take advantage of you.

Logo: A logo, in case that the person has already a clear idea of what does he wants, and done by the cheapest studio on the net won’t be less than $300.

Logo Conception: In case that a person has no idea of what he wants, the price won’t be lower than $500. Of course, the number of concept arts that the studio will make for him will be previously negociated before even touching one pencil.

Character design: In case that the person gives you the design (an OC character, for example), a character would cost between $ 40 and $70.

Character concept: If you have to invent the character and give your employer the rights, never less than $600.

Website: the conditions can variate a lot, but a website is always a big work. It goes from $500 to $2000 (small simple sites).

I hope this will be useful to you all

Sincerely

Spiritto.