Where is everyone getting their work?

[Kingpin Creative]

I'm not looking for work.. I'm a freelance designer and an environmental graphic designer interested in where people are getting work.

I see a lot of talk about national accounts and the state of the economy and payment issues and getting good work...

Is most of your work designed by others?

Is it supplied through a National company?

Do you have full design service capabilities?

Have you ever gone directly to an environmental graphic design firm looking for fabrication work.

As a designer I have a major distrust of a few Nationals (and a few design/build companies) and try to steer away from a few who have taken work over jobs to get a bigger piece of the pie. They might be the ones who are treating a few here poorly when it comes to payment.

An interesting observation and not at all a rip, but quite a few former employees of Image Point had no real signage experience prior to joining that company. I get the idea of project management, I was in construction management in a prior life. But with all the signage experience many "smaller" shops have, why not go after the smaller accounts yourself?

[Donco]

About 75% of our work is for Gas Stations, and the major oil companies have approved vendors that manufacturer signs per their specs.

This is typical for most Nat’l accounts in order for the corporate office to maintain control over consistency and quality of the signs. You'll hear that one sign company manufacturers for this brand or company.

Edited January 28, 2009 by Donco

[Erik Sine]

I'm not looking for work.. I'm a freelance designer and an environmental graphic designer interested in where people are getting work.

I see a lot of talk about national accounts and the state of the economy and payment issues and getting good work...

Is most of your work designed by others?

Is it supplied through a National company?

Do you have full design service capabilities?

Have you ever gone directly to an environmental graphic design firm looking for fabrication work.

As a designer I have a major distrust of a few Nationals (and a few design/build companies) and try to steer away from a few who have taken work over jobs to get a bigger piece of the pie. They might be the ones who are treating a few here poorly when it comes to payment.

An interesting observation and not at all a rip, but quite a few former employees of Image Point had no real signage experience prior to joining that company. I get the idea of project management, I was in construction management in a prior life. But with all the signage experience many "smaller" shops have, why not go after the smaller accounts yourself?

Most of my jobs are 95% already designed or spec'd by others, thank god because I I'm color blind and can barely handle creating stick figures.

I have never gone directly to an graphic design firm looking for fabrication work, does your company get other sign companies looking for this?

I'm not to fond in the quality of work done by some of these national sign companies, the signs are junk most of the time with the cheapest components and the crappiest processed CCFL's. But that goes for a lot of locals around here too, I probably wnet on a tangent with that. It's almost Friday