In-House vs. Agency: Pros and Cons

Agency work isn't something I've had a great deal of experience with. Most of my time after college has been instead, spent with in-house design teams.

If you're experience has been the opposite, and you're coming from the ad agency or design firm world and considering migrating to single-organization corporate work, I recommend you read this exchange. You won't find a better article than this one. It lays out all the positives, and all the negatives.

Some of the highlights:

"Having so many clients can make it hard for an agency designer to drill down their core competencies and find the essence of what they really have to offer. You also deal with a lot of different personalities and objectives that sometimes seem blurry. Working in-house means that we already know our brand and product. We know the objective of our client. "

"Attitude and understanding of the business. You have to check the ego at the door. Most commercial design will not be about creating the next masterpiece. It is about selling and positioning people, companies, products and services. Oftentimes, it is the most effective approach -- not the most artistic -- that will be the right choice. The challenge, then, is to be artistically effective."

"It is quite common for employers to start an in-house venture with the best of intentions. They hire their own 'experts' for very good fiscal and operational reasons only to devalue that expertise over time and view the in-house team as inferior to outside 'experts.' The in-house team often must work harder to prove its worth.

"The second challenge is unlimited revisions. This problem is inherent in in-house shops. The client or boss often will make a seemingly absurd number of revisions right up until -- and sometimes even after -- the project goes to print. When clients pay an agency for work and they are billed for excessive revisions, they tend to be a little more deliberate and selective about changes."

In-house teams are usually afforded an ability to tweak beyond what would be allowed for a strictly budgeted agency project. I also would add having a sense of self-investment in the success of the company. Another benefit is avoiding the less pleasant attributes of agency life, such as always pitching for new business, losing clients for a good reason or no reason at all, and being constrained by inadequate budgets. However, the single biggest perk is not having to keep track of billable hours and timesheet codes."

When you have multiple clients, the workflow is feast or famine. Working in-house means there's a constant check and balance between capacity and demand, and when something is unclear, your client is in the office down the hall."

In Switzerland, money has a special status. It is a numbered, signed piece of graphic art.

Not all dvd-r 's are created equal

So I've gone round and round with importing video from various tape media, and then went through the nightmare of burning projects to dvd with faulty dvd-r's. Note to whoever: If you want to use imovie or idvd to burn dvds, don't buy offbrand or store brand dvd-r's. If you do, half of the time you'll just burn coasters.


An interesting read is here

And more good dvd advice can be found here.

Of course, my dvd-r's were the last thing I thought of, after wasting a solid 2 days of scratching and banging my head, thinking I was doing something else wrong.

Lesson learned.
I finally went back to the store and purchased some Apple branded dvd-r media, which I hear is pretty reliable.