
The death of the web design agency - robin_reala
https://medium.com/net-magazine/the-death-of-the-web-design-agency-a79dd531bee2
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gexla
This article jumps around a lot. It seems the main point is the death of the
design agency as a model. That's a trend which has been in slow motion for
quite some time. Web design as a term probably should be buried along-side the
term webmaster.

The articles pulls examples of top agencies and then goes on to talk about
services such as Shopify eating into the low-end. As if the top agencies
sustained themselves on low-end work.

The article also makes the case that talent is difficult to come by and
expensive.

TLDR: Running a business is hard, especially one which has lots of competition
and employs a lot of expensive talent in a fast moving industry. You need to
adapt. At times adaptation goes well. At other times not so well. But there is
no shortage of work for talented developers.

Open up some archives and follow any big company. One year it's a star, the
next year it's in trouble.

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ben_jones
I'd wager that the margins are diminished because a well-accepted minimum bar
has been established that is fulfilled by templates, frameworks, and
libraries, that have all reached critical-mass.

Also I've spent several months of development time over the course of my life
designing and implementing dashboards in angular 1.x and just the other month
I googled "angular dashboard templates" out of boredom and frankly I could've
saved weeks implementing $10 solutions that ultimately were better then what I
came up with on my own (superior responsiveness, better styling, whatever).

Oh and finally all the start-up design jobs are tied to start-up funding. If
the funding goes south companies in the Bay Area will be much less willing to
drop $5, 10, 20k on design work.

~~~
kyriakos
From my experience Facebook is killing the low-end web design. Smaller
companies who would normally need a web site no longer hire an agency for one.
They put together a simple one-page landing page using a ready-made template
and do all their business through their Facebook page.

~~~
acveilleux
Can't say I blame them either. For a one-person company the minimum fee for a
good web design shop might well be a month of revenue. And Facebook is
perfectly acceptable these days for consumer focused small businesses like
restaurants, salons, bars and similar small-time retail/service business.

~~~
kyriakos
It's not just acceptable, it comes with built in marketing tools. Rather than
spending $2000 on a site and then more to advertise it, they make a Facebook
page for free and pay $500 on Facebook ads to get some traction. To me it
sounds like a better deal.

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alaskamiller
Web design is cheap now. Eastern European and Southeast Asian talents can
deliver at a fraction of a cost.

Next up is going to be mobile app design.

Additionally every other person in Silicon Valley is in a coding school or
graduating from one.

Salaries are going to drop.

Programmers are the new lawyers.

~~~
hoof_marks
Consider another aspect- agency costs. I recently asked for a quotation for
some custom work in php. To generate pdf and zip files from database with a
dashboard. Agencies quoted it as roughly US$ 340. That is steep.

So its good that a lot of help is available at sites like stackexchange. We
completed the stuff ourselves.

~~~
ido
Is it steep?

I suppose you paid the salaries for the person(s) doing that work in-house.
Assuming your programmer's salary cost (~1.3x their gross salary) is $5000 per
month and the median month having 20 work days, that price is about the
equivalent of 1 day of work for your in-house programmer.

So that price needs to pay for 1 work day for the outsourced freelance
programmer+overhead/profit margin for the company itself...Sounds reasonable
to me.

Below a certain threshold it doesn't make sense to put in the time/effort to
get a new client.

~~~
hoof_marks
true i agree on the threshold principle. A minimum time slot or billing is
reasonable. But as a client let's say thats just a slice of the entire web-
project. And if this simple stuff takes $10/hour x 34 hours. It is steep.

~~~
ido
Which programmer rates at $10/hour in salary cost? Here (Germany), this is
just about minimum wage.

So even a cashier in the supermarket or a street cleaner earns about that or
more.

EDIT: I guess the situation is different in India (just saw you're based there
from your comment history), although I remember reading that even there
developer salaries are slowly closing the gap with their western counterparts.

~~~
hoof_marks
Like i said, I am not disputing the wage or salary as such. However with
respect to a custom project it makes it costly. Again compared to having your
own people do it using help from the net. As they may not be experts
themselves.

~~~
ido
I started writing this before having seen your other comment :)

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castell
Facebook is killing the low-end web design. Instead of hiring an agency for a
small website, they just use a FB page. And before Facebook there were MySpace
and AOL(albeit with a smaller world wide reach).

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jonheller
I read this article, or a version of it, four years ago when I quit my last
job to go work at an agency. Since then business has only picked up.

It's not like these big name agencies employee hundreds of people. It's not
like GE folding. So I don't think it's fair to judge the state of the industry
mostly on the status of those companies.

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bshimmin
I'm not sure how much you can really read into a couple of big name agencies
being bought out by a couple of much bigger name companies with very deep
pockets. Presumably the founders of the big name agencies are in their 40s by
now, and perhaps they thought that taking a huge pile of money and accepting a
position as "EVP of Design" at a huge company would be a pleasant way to spend
a few years whilst they think of a new hobby to take up.

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gumby
This article is stick in the weeds.

"Web designers" were an anomaly and stuck in the past. "Web design" of
1998-2010ish was mostly designers used to paper trying to translate it to the
web (think complex use of huge tables to constrain presentation). Photoshop
was the chief mockup tool tells you how out of touch they were.

The fact is that magazines had converged on a number of useful core ideas like
black text on white pages, page numbers (mostly), text width constrained,
breaking into multiple columns if necessary, etc. People who deviated too far
from this ended up with "art" rather than a magazine. A lot of designers
thought the web would allow them to go bonkers, yet at the same time had a
command-and-control mindset that was straight out of paper-land (they'd tell
you what size to make your browser in order to read their web page, for
crime's sake).

So we ended up with some more conventions and are starting to have online (not
just web) design that fits the medium -- e.g. finally we have reactive designs
that aren't rigid table layouts that model paper so at least work to some
degree on different sized devices.

Good riddance to those old fashioned losers. Anybody can now do an OK job
using templates, and there is still room for experimentation. Hell, theres
_more_ experimentation, and a lot of it involves UI research, something
anathema to magazine and poster designers!

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ianpurton
"A few high-profile acquisitions coupled with a downturn in business has led
to speculation that we are witnessing the end of an era"

A downturn? The article reaches a conclusion then supports it own conclusion
with anecdotal evidence.

Maybe the amount of money spent in the design agency industry has increased
but it's being spent at bigger firms.

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spiderfarmer
Apps, social media presence and content marketing have all been eating away
the 'website' budgets, while costs (with responsive design taking more time)
have gone up. One way to stay relevant as an agency is being able to integrate
all online chanels. Adapt or die.

