David Milisock's Blog
https://au.marketo.com/
Never noticed this until a read today.
Marketo is more than just software - when you use it, you get a playbook for digital marketing success.
Not that I'm suggesting Corel should do this. Maybe worth finding a partner that's a "king" in this area.
Alternatives — Always looking for better than Adobe. financesonline.com/.../
I agree, I only use Acrobat Pro 9 anymore and that's because of the Adobe conforming PDF driver and Distiller. I us no Adobe graphics applications any longer and that has been for several years.
One font tt lakes $450, my cost. What do I charge the client who must have it now?
I do vastly much more then just signs. A project many times will be a few major architectural signs, exterior and interior way finding, ADA signage. Several brochures, an invitation package, donor wall.
The designer designed the logo, printed materials and other stuff. Six weeks later the end user wants changes to the printed materials and come to us. I tell them they need the designer to make changes, choose a different font we already own or buy the font and we'll make changes. Small commercial jobs can't put out $450 for a font family.
Usually by then the end user no longer wants a relationship with the designer for edits and we pick a font. Rarely in commercial work will they buy a font. Architectural users most likely will buy the font.
Two signs $8,300, $450 is more than 5% of the sign cost. If you spread that out over many jobs and over time no big deal. Some designers go that way many go the POS free online path.
Regarding TT Lakes, you don't have to buy the entire family. The original version of TT Lakes currently costs $199 (at fonts.com) for the family of 54 styles or $99 for one of 3 width packages. But individual styles are available for $25 per file. The entire TT Lakes Neue type family (91 font files, including an OTF Variable font) costs $490. The Neue version of TT Lakes debuted this past June and was on sale for a deep discount (90% off if I recall correctly). Individual styles of TT Lakes Neue are available for $49.
Earlier I mistakenly referred to Stone Sans in relation to a Farmer's Insurance project; I meant to mention Slate Pro. I paid $79 for a single Medium weight of it. That's a bit much for a single font file, but it's far less than $499 for the complete family. We had no problem billing the client for the single font file purchase.
You say you "do vastly much more than just signs." Do you actually work at a real sign company? By "real sign company," I mean a company that actually has sign manufacturing capabilities on site, its own service trucks to install and maintain signs and in-house staff to design and sell the products. I've seen plenty of outfits over the years characterizing themselves as "sign companies" when they're no more than a middle man outfit doing sales work and jobbing out everything else. They'll act like they're a sign company to the clients when selling some kind of sign package. Then they come to us, wanting us to do the work for next to nothing and in ridiculously short turn around times. Some of these middle man types don't even have any experience working in an actual sign company (the designers they hire often have no experience working in a sign company either). We don't run off such people unless the inquiry is just flat out insulting; we'll give them our bid and estimated turn-around time. Most of the time they go hunting for a cheaper option. That's fine because we're busy selling, building and installing our own stuff. The third party firms that end up insisting on doing business with us often have been burned by the cheap sign outfits too many times.
I do some of all the above. To stay profitable I've sectioned off how we work. I have a 40' lift, and rent cranes or lifts, we've gone to 100'. I've backed off the install aspect except for oversight as I'm old and really cranky.
I hate cheap people, it's one of the main reasons I avoid designers. You simply cannot own every piece of equipment needed so you need vendors who can trust you. I used a guy for extra large plasma cutting, I ask for a price and he gave me one. I ask if he was comfortable with the price. He seemed unsure so I told him let's add 15%. It turned out it was 12% more. He and I made out, he treats me well.
I would rather lose a job then have my people or my vendors lose money. I only load power supplies to 80%, I use RTV not commercial grade silicone, superior grade tools. Yes my projects cost more up front but they last and in the long run are cheaper.
We only build the custom signs and the donor/history walls because it's what we can do and make a profit. An example would be entrance and way finding for a retirement village. I got called for repair of the signs in the first phase and created and installed the signs for the second and third phase.
The first phase was done by a company that didn't understand working with coreten steel and aluminum. They ended up with supports rusting out and aluminum oxidation streaks. This nursing home was $750,000 minimum to get in to. So you understand the problem.
For most commercial work the budget won't support our costs so we'll buy those cheap cans and stick built crap and put them up. It keeps the staff paid and out of trouble.
A too large a percentage of my time is zoning, variance drawings and hearings. Lighting dispersion drawings have become the rage with municipalities in my area. I'm not bitching I can make decent money and they pay for the application fees and my presentation time.
The government sucks, a variance starts at $1,000+, then the drawings and presentation can be $1,500 to $2,000 and that's win or lose. I started a printing company, built it up and sold it, they are now a vendor, did the same with a web business early in the internet days and a computer company.
Using Draw and a PC I was not limited in many ways a MAC Adobe user was so I instantly went from $50 average print billings to $5,000+ billings to an endless set of possibilities. Building web, building computers and supporting software, utilizing nearly any material to build some art somewhere.
I read this forum and I don't get it, build a powerful computer, load up Draw and use your imagination. Hell I'm a dumb ass farm boy from South Central PA and I'm having a blast and making money even while trying to retire. When the emails come in it's from literally anywhere in the world from anyone, from a church in Ireland to a movie production company in Japan. You don't need to be a huge company but you also don't need to think small.
Here's an example just this morning after I wrote this post. 5 images editing jobs came in and a request to prepare a variance for 2 entrance signs that I'm not even installing 3 States away.
Amazing how far off topic a conversation can go without ever hitting a point that is connected to the initial topic, being Adobe becoming everything from a stock shot library to a CRM. Not that I care.
I have news for Adobe, the print industry moved that direction in a big way 30 years ago. Any graphics shop big enough to need one already has one.
Corel is trying to migrate that way with its online proofing and customer communication portal but it will be a waste of time.
As far as drifting a subject people ask I answer.
I don't think the Abode CRM is targeted at print shops. They are targeting small agencies, design studios and inhouse marketers; the ones that are the "believers". I do think this is all building to a case where Corel (likely the largest competitor) and the rest of the non Adobe providers form a promotional group. They are all being shat on with this "only Adobe is industry standard" rubbish. I've been listening to this "only Adobe is industry standard" with "the Mac is designed for graphics" BS for 30 years. I haven't seen much effort to counter it. That said, I'm talking from Australia. We are prone to "BMW" thinking.
Have you ever seen what happens to a business after a CRM is installed? The continuity that is promised is the first thing that goes. The staff relies on the computer system and it has no brain. I've seen it with every vendor I've used. Companies need brains and a manager not a software.
Here's the thing: hate on Adobe all you want. But right now they are commanding the lead by a way out in front clear margin. Corel meanwhile is choking on their dust. Most of the major branding work and advertising work for print and motion graphics is being done using Adobe's stuff. The same is absolutely true for corporate branding work. That's pretty much ALL Adobe.
I work full time in the sign industry. And I have to deal with a lot of customer provided artwork. 100% of the major corporate assets is all generated using Adobe software. None of it is done using CorelDRAW. Corel used to hold a very commanding footprint in the sign industry space. They don't any longer. And that's mainly because CorelDRAW is really deficient at importing and outputting Adobe Illustrator generated artwork. For the past 20 years CorelDRAW has been stuck running in a mode of catch-up compared to Adobe Illustrator (among Adobe's other applications). That really didn't mean all that much when most of the sign industry was geared to outputting art through vinyl cutters and routing tables. Vector shapes with a single color could be handled by all kinds of applications. Once the large format printers started getting installed inside sign companies and once sign companies started selling full color LED jumbotron signs capable of showing full motion video and motion graphics the Corel option really started coming up short. And it really came up short big time when a major company built its branding assets using features in Adobe Illustrator that could not be rendered properly within CorelDRAW.
Yeah, it costs money to pay for a Creative Cloud license. But it also costs a lot of time and money to have to re-build client assets made in Adobe software where it can work in a Corel environment. And what does that gain? What does it gain when the leading large format digital printing RIP applications (Onyx, RasterLink Pro, Caldera) are built around Adobe output?
It took over a decade for Corel to incorporate full support for OpenType after Adobe built it into the first Creative Suite version of Illustrator. CorelDRAW introduced Variable Font support years after Illustrator. Will Corel herald the support of OpenType-SVG font support and free-form gradients in CorelDRAW 2021?
Bobby you're dead on! I have no friggin idea what Corel is thinking. If you're servicing design shops and have a workable volume of business an Adobe CC seat makes sense. If you design art to sell on the internet Adobe is the easy option. With that said if people with CS buy complex art created in later versions of CC their screwed.
Corel only makes sense if you create the file and output it yourself. If you really good you can send to ANY RIP software. I've used Onyx, RasterLink Pro and dozens of others including all the top of the line printing RIPS for press. All from CorelDRAW.
As far as large and grand format Adobe has exactly zero to offer me. I've done 80' banners that hung down the sides of building in Vegas. I just did a 35' x 10' for a golf club renovation for an architect all out of Photo-PAINT. I've done 125 pieces that were cut out of 1 sheet on a 5' x 10' Zund cutter. Wraps for buses, trailers, large Sprinters down to Mini Coopers. Adobe offers nothing of value for this work.
In every municipality in my County animated variable data content on signs is illegal, variable data signs have been so restricted in size they are next to useless. I believe in Kentucky or Tennessee they are illegal in the entire State. I've done maybe 30 of them and the profit margins just plain suck so when they come in I just price myself out of them.
There's plenty of billing but at the end of the day my staff gets paid and I get peanuts. I prefer that my staff and I both make money. Let's face it $85,000 in billing to put $5,000 in my pocket balanced against the time I put in is a do not do project!
In my area South Central PA I know of only 2 design shops that have more than 20 employees. They do zero print and when they needed a sign they gave it to a shop as a mockup, who came to me and I desiged them to work.
The rest they I know of are extremely poorly managed 1 to 5 person shops. I do no direct business with design shops and my margins went up. So I can believe they'll be dumb enough to fall for a CRM.
Every shop I know changed how they worked to fit the CRM rather the the developer delivering a CRM that worked as the company works. In 1990 I built a Microsoft Access data base that was later modified with vendor module and Inuse it to this day. It works like I do.
David, Adobe may not have anything to offer to you compared to CorelDRAW. The way it looks to me CorelDRAW is in a struggle to remain relevant. Nearly all the functional advantages Corel has had over Illustrator have disappeared. Corel had graphic design industry niches such as the sign industry mostly to themselves (unless you count sign industry specific design applications such as Flexi, GerberOmega, SignLab, etc as competitors). Adobe has been slowly, steadily chipping away at Corel's foothold at the high end. And then there are "affordable" upstarts now chipping away at the low end.
Here's the thing I find really troubling: Corel has done a terrible job maintaining CorelDRAW over its past couple or so versions. Version 2020 is near the end up its product cycle. In the space of a year CDR 2020 received just one point release update and one hot fix. That's it. Various bugs remain. I've had to keep older versions of CorelDRAW running alongside on both my work desktop and notebook at home to work around the bugs present in CDR 2020. By comparison Illustrator 24 received 3 serious point release updates and more than a dozen smaller bug fix updates. Illustrator 25 has already received a couple minor updates since being introduced in late October (including one update this morning).
The folks running Corel appear to think they're equal in stature to Adobe in the graphics industry. If they really want to be seen in that manner they have to put a lot more development muscle behind CorelDRAW. Right now CorelDRAW is languishing from neglect. Compound that with the new pricing model ($249 per year subscription or $499 full + $149 annually for "upgrade protection"). I think it's a recipe for ruin.
IMHO, CorelDRAW needs to go back to a 2 year product cycle. They're just not delivering the goods on an annual basis, and certainly not for these prices -which they need to re-visit. I think they need to bring back normal perpetual license upgrades. I think they run a high risk of losing customers. Some may go it with Adobe exclusively. Some may look for alternatives to both Corel and Adobe. Many CorelDRAW users are simply staying put with old versions. I may do that if I see my "upgrade protection" price boosted from $99 to $149 when CorelDRAW 2021 is released.
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In regards to LED-based variable message signs, my company does quite well selling them. We do get a decent mark-up on them (there's no way we're selling them at cost). We primarily sell Daktronics displays. They cost a bit more on the front end, but they look better and hold up a lot better. We know how to service the displays, which is extremely important. If a sign company doesn't have anyone on staff who can replace driver boards, controllers, etc they should not try selling that kind of product in the first place.
Many city/town governments have drafted serious restrictions or outright bans on LED variable message signs. They still remain legal in many other places. But the much bigger problem is the growing number of sign codes that put severe restrictions on all kinds of signs. I think it's a civic backlash to the "anything goes" junky attitude so many businesses and sign companies have had with on-premise signs. There's a lot of blatantly unprofessional eye-sore garbage getting erected in too many places. Squeezed and stretched default Arial is all over the place. And then there's a lot of sign structures that are just poorly maintained (missing faces, dead lamps, rusting parts, etc). That adds to blight.
A lot of cities and towns have had it past their eyeballs with that nonsense. Then they look to high income enclaves where signs are hardly visible at all. The only ones you see are tombstone sized monuments covered up with bushes or modest channel letter signs on a building. The town fathers in the places struggling with blight see how nice the high income areas look and want to copy it. The problem is on-premise signs do have a vital, necessary function for local businesses. And if they cannot advertise using that medium it just makes it easier for customers to stay home and order from competitors online.