Captain Mark Simon. Images courtesy of Mark Simon.

Delivery. The final frontier.

These are the voyages of every artist at the end of every job.

Our mission:
To make a living with our art and not have our clients drive us crazy...
To seek out new clients; new income producing jobs...
To boldly go where our art has never been.

Captain's log. Stardate: Yesterday. Client Q has hired me to design a new quantum animated logo. I've done jobs like this a hundred times, but he wants it delivered at warp speed.

The prime directive is that the client is always right and we should always do what the client wants. But is that the smartest way to run a business? What if jumping through client wormholes and never sleeping is bad for both my career and the client's job?

I remember a briefing at Starfleet Academy when a Vulcan came to speak. He said that what clients always want is a great job. They may ask for the impossible. They may make unrealistic deadline demands, but what they really want is great art. Superior design.

That sounded logical to me.

I was struggling with how to deal with Q, as always, as I was trying to come up with a schedule on this job that satisfied him, didn't drive me crazy and allowed time to do quality work.

There are a few problems with running at warp speed on a project. You don't have time to sit back and make sure the direction you're going is the best one. Unexpected things come up in business and you have to account for the unexpected. Other jobs come up. If you tell a client that you will deliver at a certain time, they don't care if your Delithium crystals exploded and took out half your computer systems. They don't care if the Klingons attacked your network. They only care if they get the work they asked for in the amount of time they were promised and that it looks great.