(upbeat music)
- The other day I received an email
from a prospective client looking
for about 80 hours of work to be done in under 24 hours.
And when I came back to her and said,
we can definitely do this,
but it will require double, if not triple, the team members
and double, if not triple, the cost,
well, I never heard from her again.
The fact is is we often think that visual content,
especially great high-quality visual content,
took a small amount of time to produce
because the better it looks,
the more it should feel like it was seamless
and easy to produce.
In reality, though, the better something looks,
the more time it takes, especially if it looks simple.
And so when you're looking for great quality visual content,
consider the fact that you really do need
to allow enough runway for the agency or freelancer
to execute on that content.
This makes me think about the value pyramid
of good, fast, and cheap.
You can have something that's good and fast,
but it's not going to be cheap.
You can have something that's good and cheap,
but it's not going to be fast.
And you can have something fast and cheap,
but it's not going to be good.
And so if you want great content,
consider the following timelines.
Anything that is static in nature,
and by static I mean it's not clickable
where you can interact with it
and there's no animation or moving elements to it.
Anything static in nature should have a runway
of at least two weeks to produce.
This gives you time to settle on a concept,
to review options,
and really produce something high-quality.
Anything animated in nature should take
at least four weeks to produce unless it's under 30 seconds.
But you really have to consider with something animated
that every second of animation is going to require
about one to three hours of production time.
And then anything interactive in nature should be
about three to six weeks to produce,
depending on the level of functionality.
You want to make sure
that you're giving the developer enough time
to test the final developed product
across all browsers and devices.
This can take some time,
especially with quality assessments.
So be sure to provide enough runway
to produce great quality visual content
because if you needed the work done yesterday,
you're not going to get something super high-quality
at a good price,
or you're going to get something super high-quality
at triple the price than you should've paid.