
A favicon? That’ll be £585 please. - mathias
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ico_website_favicon_cost
======
larrik
1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately.
Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the
original document DOES list it separately)

2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that.

3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are
compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual
designer.

It's easy to say "I could do that in 5 minutes." (cite: from the email
exchange) But, could you? Including the design? And making sure after you
shrunk it down it still looked okay? There's a good chance you'll need to go
in there and draw each pixel by hand to make it look right (and it better be
right).

Favicons are important, it's a mistake to believe they are always a 5 minute
project.

(edited to add "always" to the last sentence)

~~~
spxdcz
True, but this DOES look like a five minute project. I just screen-grabbed
their large logo, put it into Photoshop, reversed the colors and reduced it to
16x16, and it looks almost exactly the same as their icon - no pixel-pushing
required. Sure, the colors aren't perfect, but any semi-decent graphic
designer could produce that favicon (from the original logo) in 10 minutes
maximum. It's not a complicated face, or anything that uses sub-pixel
rendering, or anything like that.

EDIT: Here's my 30 second 'inverse and crop' favicon next to their £585
favicon. Not much pixel-pushing going on there...
<http://fanranked.com/ico_favicon.png>

~~~
msbarnett
I suspect this is a case of £5 for the final icon, £580 for the other 10 comps
and three rounds of meetings you had to go through to decide on the inverted
version in the first place.

It's trivial to recreate the end result, but you can't ignore that the end
result wasn't a foregone conclusion; ideas had to be floated and presented and
agreed upon, etc. Especially with high-politic clients, getting consensus on
even a small thing can take a lot of time.

~~~
DougBTX
See the Colour of the Bike Shed.

------
DrStalker
I've charegd a client over $1000 for a one-line script that used SCP to copy a
file from one place to another. I even told them upfront it would be a trivial
one-line script, and made no pretense it was not a really simple thing to do.

But by the time you cover quoting, invoicing, documentation for the change
control process and arranging the required access there is a whole days effort
spent on the task.

Just because something is easy to do in an environment where you have complete
control and no need to justify and document changes doesn't mean it's easy to
do in a production environment, and that's assuming the icon itself wasn't
properly hand-crafted pixel by pixel to get the best result.

------
burgerbrain
£1 for the new favicon, £584 for knowing how to do it.

~~~
Natsu
> £584 for knowing how to do it.

1) Draw crappy icon in any of the zillion free icon editors out there (e.g.
IconEdit32).

2) Name the file 'favicon.ico' and upload it to the root directory of the
website.

I have a feeling I should be doing consulting in the UK or something.

~~~
RaRic
I need a favicon. Will you do it for ten bucks?

~~~
Natsu
I'd be happy to help you for free. My email is in my HN profile.

------
lukosan78
Some factors to bear in mind before balking:

1) The work was done under a support contract, therefore it was probably
billed on time and materials and there may also be a minimum or call-out
charge (it's the goal of a lot of companies to be able to charge a daily-rate
instead of an hourly one). When they say it's not quoted for separately they
mean that they didn't put out an RFP, tender it and agree a fixed price
beforehand, they asked Reading Room to do the work under an existing
contractual agreement at pre-agreed rates.

2) If the work is of a high priority then the hourly cost is greater.

3) It's a government site therefore they probably have a change management
process in place which would mean that before anything touches a production
server it has to be signed off. If they do things properly (which I honestly
don't believe for a second) then there's no way in the world a developer or
designer would be able to touch a production server (let alone two) and this
would be someone else's job.

4) the design process may have not been as straightforward as just reducing
the size. Perhaps they wanted to try it different colours, etc. ? All we can
see is the end result and not the process.

Of course, they may have just been ripped off. But then so have we by making
pointless requests under the Freedom of Information Act which isn't going to
accomplish anything more than an inflated sense of our own self-worth.

------
jasondavies
Somewhat ironic that the favicon was for an organisation called ICO.

~~~
Silhouette
Also ironic that if you hover over it in Firefox, it says "This web site does
not supply identity information." :-)

(The ICO is the UK government body responsible for, among other things,
regulating the processing and disclosure of personal data.)

------
csomar
If it's for the creation of a new favicon, so that's actually low. Let say, 3
designer hold a discussion together to exchange ideas and mock-ups. They'll
need to know what the website is about, what is its' logo, what should the
favicon include... If it takes 3 hours, that's 3 x 3 = 9.

Then a designer will need to draw the real favicon from that mock-up, don't
forget that he'll need to make many resolutions and then tests them. Let say
that take 2 hours, including a final discussion with the other members of the
team.

So in total we have 11 hours, if you consider $150/hour a good rate for a
professional, then you'll have $1,650.

------
ebaysucks
If upgrading to a two server environment causes the price of a favicon to
balloon to $585, web designers are going to make millions when the government
starts hosting in the cloud.

~~~
danielharan
s/\$/£/

------
rwhitman
The fact that they were ready to supply an honest answer to the inquiry is
pretty cool. Regardless of how steep the cost of that favicon was, I'm
impressed by how they can be held accountable for it

------
corin_
"I can advised [sic] you that the work needed to put the favicon live was
complicated by an old environment (which has since been updated) that caused
issues and extended the time taken to carry out the work."

What?

~~~
bad_user
You missed the clarification:

    
    
        I can confirm that that the old website 
        development environment was upgraded 
        from one server to two.

~~~
corin_
How does that have any impact on the cost of a favicon? Unless they were
charged per FTP transfer...

~~~
Groxx
I wonder if they were the ones who set the favicon up so it worked on their
server.

If that's the case, diving around someone else's code for £585 is pretty
cheap.

~~~
bad_user
Behold, the magic of Apache (or pretty much any web server) ...

    
    
       Alias favicon.ico /path/to/your/physical/location/favicon.ico
    

Now please give £300 for selling you this tip.

~~~
Groxx
Here's £150, because you only told me how to do it on _one_ server :P

Curiosity: does that work for subdomains with different favicons?

~~~
bad_user
Quick and dirty solution, for each favicon you'll have a different virtual
host inside Apache.

And I fail to grasp the situation where you've got multiple subdomains setup
inside the same virtual host config (through ServerAlias), but still having
different favicons. But even for this case you can probably come up with
something based on mod_rewrite.

------
axod
The irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost,
likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out.

Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than
was paid out originally in expenses.

£585 is nothing in that sort of context.

~~~
corin_
Assuming you are employing hyperbole I'll skip over the idea of it costing
more than £585 in their time to find out.

As to the MPs' expenses stuff, I don't know the figures of how much the
inquiry cost, but assuming you're right that it cost more, it doesn't mean
they shouldn't have done it.

For one reason, ethics - should police ignore crimes when it appears that the
damage caused by the criminal is less than it would cost the police force to
pursue it?

For another, the future - If you cut off the problem then it doesn't keep
costing money year after year, which would add up to costing more than the
inquiry did.

~~~
axod
I'm not in the least... It probably took them an hour to find out, reply to
the emails etc. They probably had to ask others etc. Their salary,
electricity, office overhead etc. I'd expect it came to a fair bit more than
£585 to deal with the request for information.

The MP expenses thing was always ridiculous. So an MPs husband mistakenly put
in an expense claim for £10 adult movie. Sure it sells papers, but £10 is
nothing. We spend more on paper cups in a single room of the NHS.

The rules were ridiculously open to interpretation - second homes etc. Couple
that with the fact that MPs get paid next to nothing, and it's no wonder they
try to claim expenses for everything.

The answer is to pay MPs more - the going rate for if they're in the business
world. If you don't want corruption or taking liberties, you must start by
paying a fair wage.

~~~
notahacker
I agree that MPs are _relatively_ underpaid [1] and mistaken adult movie
claims are a cause for embarrassment rather than the source of the national
debt.

But I don't think it's ridiculous to prosecute MPs who defraud the public by
claiming "homes" belonging to other people that they've never even stayed in;
even though the prosecution costs far more than the actual offence. Lines have
to be drawn. It's expensive to prosecute people for shoplifting too.

[1]underpaid enough to be justifiably anal about claiming expenses; not so
underpaid that doubling their income by home flipping is the only way they can
feed their families

~~~
axod
As far as I know only 2 MPs or so were prosecuted. Considering the enquiry
cost several million, that doesn't seem like money well spent.

~~~
whatusername
Money spent on stuff like that can act as a deterrant for the future.. So it
might be about break-even.

~~~
axod
Can also dissuade good people from going into politics if their every expense
will be scrutinize nit-picked etc.

Why put up with all the BS and low pay of politics when you can go work for a
big company and run up massive expense accounts for lap dancing clubs or
whatever else you feel like?

I'd say the jury's out on it...

------
rriepe
If you factor in the time for bothersome, inane e-mails, then their 585 figure
makes more sense.

~~~
alexqgb
That's actually not a joke. There is probably a whole layer of internal costs
for every government agency involved, maintaining the paper trails that allow
these questions to be answered in the first place.

There's a near-zero probability that these laws (yes, laws) _don't_ have some
impact on the job-management process, which will carry into procedural burdens
for vendor to factor into their quoted prices.

------
paulirish
Fantastical coincidence: the most expensive favicon.ico was charged to an
organization whose branding is a lowercase 'ico'

------
electrichead
You know, making an effective favicon probably would take a lot of time. There
is just not enough room. I would say it is akin to shoving a complex program
into a handful of bytes.

That being said, this particular favicon was not so much designed as resized,
and so I totally agree that they got ripped off!

------
famfamfam
You could assume that the time allocations could be broken down as follows
(billable by the hour), which makes it more believable that the total cost
could be approx £585.

* 1 hour - Account handler discusses with request with client, adds to studio traffic scheduler

* 2 hours - Icon development by designer

* 3 hours - Developer wrestles with old website platform to try and add relevant <link> to every template

* 1 hour - Project Manager reviews and discusses with client

* 1 hour - Developer deploys to production environment

Making 8 hours at approx £75/h (£600) which all sounds perfectly believable
for a London digital studio.

One of the issues with the low barrier to entry to web development is that a
class of people exist who believe that the job is entirely a process of making
a website (or a favicon) and uploading it via FTP, maybe even installing
Wordpress. Complex client relationships, business/deployment processes and old
web systems do not factor into their equation for cost. It is important that
these people exist, otherwise the cost of being involved with the web would be
astronomical for businesses at the lower end, but there _are_ good industry
practices for quality work and jobs required at the higher end which they are
putting in jeopardy with sensationalist headlines such as this one. Some
clients have more available money, but require much more effort than throwing
up a few plugins and shooting them an email once it is done. Nor is favicon
design a case of taking one of my Silk icons are throwing it through a
dynamicdrive favicon maker.

That said, there are still a few examples of UK website procurement which goes
beyond what you might call value for money, such as Birmingham Council's
website which cost £3m ([http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-
news/2009/08/04/...](http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-
news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-
to-2-8m-65233-24307674/)), although my concern with that website was not so
much the cost but the quality of the work (from a quick scan I don't have the
same concerns about the ICO website).

------
m0th87
£0.57 ($0.92) per pixel (it was 32x32 :)

~~~
jasondavies
It would have only cost £146.25 if they had gone for 16x16 :)

------
javanix
At my current salary, it would take me about 10 days of work to reach £585 in
straight labor costs.

Honestly, that doesn't seem to be too overly ridiculous to me. There is a lot
of work that goes into designing them (and installing them into each page of a
website, especially if the favicon was new and not an update). If the company
in question didn't have someone perfectly familiar with the site in question,
I can see it taking a week or so to get it out the door. What costs would be
added by going through the process of taking bids? I wouldn't be surprised if
those in themselves ran to £100 - £200.

------
kpeel
Am I the only one impressed with the speed and (relatively) decent and
detailed response by the government in this case?

------
arnorhs
I've seen much worse. One being a client billed 7 hours x roughly $150 for...
wait for it... modifying a dns entry...

This is not a joke, and it was a pretty sizable dev shop here in iceland

------
michaelpinto
If you are retouching a favicon pixel-by-pixel I can see that racking up a few
hours: £585 = $944, so if a designer is say charging $150 to work on a complex
logo that would quickly add up. It's actually much harder to create something
good in the space of just a few pixels as opposed to a social media icon which
might give you 100 pixels.

By the way I noticed yesterday that Hacker news is going to start a designer's
directory because there "are so few good designers". I submit the problem
really is that there are so few programmers who can be bothered to learn
anything about designers or how they work.

In fact the very notion that designers are some secondary set of dumb hands is
quite insulting. The reality is that product design (of any sort) should START
with a designer and not an engineer. VCs should give more serious thought that
an BFA or MFA is worth far more than a CS or MBA.

------
gte910h
It only cost 585 pounds to add a favicon to a government website?

I'm surprised it wasn't more.

Working wit the government is not cheap. It is not easy. It is not something
that lends itself to lean development shops. That development work is
supporting a bevy of sales and process people to deal with government stuff.
585 pounds is cheap

------
scsmith
I'd like to know what the cost of getting this response was, sure the icon's
expensive but at that rate it probably cost another couple of hundred to give
all this information (I know it's internal and not a contractor but someone
has to do it).

------
linker3000
Scary thing is I encountered a similar 'issue':

The quote was to modify a piece of linux-based kit to work with a regular
screen and keyboard instead of a touchscreen. The cost? £3300 for
'development'.

I was asked to grab a piece of sample kit and liaise with the development
company to have the work done. To cut a long story short, one of the
developers called me back a day or so later and gave me instructions on how to
change one line in an XML file from TOUCHSCREEN=YES to NO.

After I had completed the work, I reported back to the man in charge of the
project and queried the cost. He said that since it was being passed to the
customer it was not an issue.

------
singular
I spent a _long_ time trying to get mine right, and it's still looks a bit
shabby in my mind - <http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/> \- I'm not actually that
surprised by the cost.

This seems to me to be classic non-tech manager thinking - 'how on earth can a
16x16 icon cost that much?!' - but once you factor in all the various factors
it's not so obvious. Just because the instinctive reaction is 'that's
ridiculous!' it doesn't mean that should override an actual analysis of what
might actually be involved.

~~~
ahi
Your favicon is far more complicated than theirs is:
<http://www.ico.gov.uk/favicon.ico>

That's a 10 minute job.

~~~
Tichy
Wow, that icon sucks

------
noginn
"the work needed to put the favicon live was complicated by an old environment
(which has since been updated) that caused issues and extended the time taken
to carry out the work."

Sounds like their old CMS system made it difficult to actually add a favicon
in the template. I very much doubt the quoted price is just for creating the
icon.

------
lwhi
My guess is that someone who isn't knowledgeable about web development drew up
this list of costs.

Perhaps they transposed a list of requirements / features and assigned the
breakdown incorrectly - assigning too much cost/time emphasis to favicon
design.

------
Tichy
I think another government (France?) paid several million EUR for a jingle for
the World Exhibition. It was made by the band Kraftwerk, but still.

------
VladRussian
common guys! the 53 miles of US border fence cost 1B.

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41083850/ns/us_news-security/>

It is about $300/inch. That would be 53 miles of new favicon/inch ($300 vs 585
pounds - thats 70% volume discount given by Boing to teh US government). Look
at the picture at the link above - it is a really hi-tech fence.

------
dolphenstein
<sarcasm>Great point! The government should source all their development work
from craigslist from now on!</sarcasm>

------
pclark
I think this is the company: <http://www.readingroom.com>

------
switch007
I don't know whether I'm disgusted or full of glee that my company is working
hard on government tenders.

------
radley
client -> agency client rep -> in-agency meeting -> agency talent rep ->
studio(s) -> studio rep -> studio art director -> studio art grunt ->
photoshop / favicon.cc

------
tomelders
So is this guy trying to make the point that "design is worthless"?

------
ethan
favicon was not quoted separately, wasn't 585 pounds, non-story

------
lachyg
That's disgraceful... I don't know what else to say.

~~~
astrodust
If you've never done work on a government contract you can imagine how this
simple favicon might've gone through fifty revisions. On highly technical
projects people with no technical skill tend to latch on to the little things
they do understand and want to meddle with them endlessly.

This is the "Bike Shed Principle" or Parkinson's Law of Triviality
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality>)

~~~
nickbarnwell
For those who have too little time to bother with broken links, the article is
located at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality>

------
razzaj
Dude... where i am from... you ask such a question to the government they will
laugh to your face ! should you insist security is called... If you come back
you will be thrown in jail... On another note... a FAVICON generator website
business startup anyone (of course based out of the UK)? lol

~~~
bad_user

         based out of the UK
    

Why? The seem willing to pay for favicons :)

    
    
         favicon generation:   £0
         installation:         £200
         1-year email support: £200
         --------------------------
         TOTAL (*):            £400
         Savings (*):          £185
    
         * VAT not included

~~~
razzaj
Yeah that is what i meant. Not "based outside of" ... well i think it is bad
english anyway my fault, i meant "based in the UK".

------
JonnieCache
This is why the UK is so broke. Corrupt government procurement procedures.
Departments overpay like this for various reasons, having to spend the whole
budget is a good one. The UK is very corrupt, but our establishment is very
good at hiding it and making it all legitimate. Look up some data about
Private Finance Initiatives if you want to be really shocked, a £550 favicon
is nothing compared to the billions that have been taken from us.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/24/pfi-nhs>

In many of these cases, the procurement procedure is ITSELF contracted out to
a third company that will charge a "procurement fee" as a percentage of the
value of the final contract. Obviously this incentivises them to pick the most
expensive supplier.

I'm trying to find a source but coming up short, google gives me pages and
pages of worthless drek from the government websites themselves. I'll try to
edit in a link later.

