Design Reflection

"There are three elements to juggle in every design job: time, quality, and money. If you press one, it will affect the other two. Rush a job and your costs will increase while the quality of the job declines. Take extra time and the quality will increase, but so will the production costs. Decrease the budget and your clients will love you forever if you can keep quality and time from being adversely affected.
Every professional graphic designer has encountered an enthusiastic client whose hopes and dreams exceed the reality of the project’s budget. On the flip side, every potential clients needs to know that the term “low budget” doesn’t mean a brochure, poster, or Website has to look cheap just because the designer was willing to accept, and was even inspired by, the project’s economics. Intuition, ingenuity, and inventiveness on the part of the designer, in both the design and production phases, coupled with openness and objectivity on the part of the client, can yield some amazing results that don’t squander precious time, quality, or money.
The success of Graphic Design clearly demonstrated that it is possible to design a promotional or marketing piece economically by using fresh ideas, daring production techniques, and new presentation solution. However, the design world changes rapidly. In the past three years, technology has introduced cost-effective ways to produce and distribute multimedia projects on floppy disks and CD-ROMs. The Internet has created a phenomenal means for delivering information in full color (even with animation) throughout the world for less in materials cost than the price of a conventional black-and-white ad in a small-town newspaper.
And there’s been a design and production backlash in recent years: a rediscovery of less mass-produced projects that appear more organic dominated the 1980s and early 1990s. This alternate direction can partially be blamed on the world’s sudden immersion into computers, the Web, color inkjet printers, digital printing systems, DVD, and numerous other electronic communications devices. With software that can produce slick, professional, and rather bland, designs now readily available, designers must search for aesthetics from hand-tinted photography, hand-cut color separations, hand-assembled booklets, or hand-bound brochures. And once again, they must be willing to spend a few hours honing their manual skills if they want their work to stand out."

From the book "Design Sense - Graphic Design on a limited budget" / Anistatia R. Miller & Jared M. Brown