design collective
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- ae
I am starting a design / web collective with a few other designers / developers. Anyone have any experience with this? From a client perspective - anything to look out for? From an internal perspective, has anyone experienced issues? I have seen athletics in NYC doing something similar and it seams to work.
- MSTRPLN0
like The KDU?
- MLP0
the issue will always be people wanting to be down and never following through on work
- baseline_shift0
^ thats the problem with all collectives. i was part of an 'Art Collective' once, and it hurt my productivity. Everyone wanted to shoot out ideas and talk about concepts and argue. Nobody wanted to buckled down and actually execute. It was worthless. We got nothing done.
I would only get involved with people who have a history of getting shit done.
- ae0
KDU is a massive collective. We have a core group of 5. Baseline, how did you guys split the work / money?
- baseline_shift0
Well, we were a fine art collective, so we didnt have clients and contracts. We just worked toward getting a group show.
As far as the work, the big talkers never showed up to help with painting the space or hanging the work. Everyone threw around ideas but wouldnt dedicate the money or time to execute them.
We did wind up getting a space and showing, but it was kinda poor, IMO. I didnt sell any work, and wound up not being involved at all after this experience. It sorta taught me that most people (especially young, "creative types") arent reliable.
- Not that this is 100% relevant to what you are trying to do, just make sure you share work with people who you know can execute.baseline_shift
- know can execute.baseline_shift
- i guess this is a little different as we all have successful small businesses but currently can't compete with large studios. With our powers combined though...ae
- acescence0
get a project manager / producer type
- ae0
acescence - is this coming from experience?
- dan53820
I actually run something similar and I will tell you that the hardest part is making sure everyone follows through on their tasks on time.
- ae0
dan... how did you setup your collective? is there a figurehead company / legal entity?
- akrokdesign0
wouldn't it be easier just to start a studio?
- applepirate0
ive been running cured collab as a collective of creatives. illustrator, web, flash, programming.
its working well b/c we all have our places. and all want to see the check come thru.
the team needs to have a project manager for sure. just one of the members of the collective that is anal and knows how to hit deadlines 110% of the time.
- WeLoveNoise0
i am in one in manchester
works really well but only with small numbers i think - when its starts growing, thats when you as a member dont get as many optionsanother one in manchester is http://www.factory311.com/
- ae0
factory311.com look slick. what is yours? welovenoise.com?
- pressplay0
be sure you have a person that cares for stuff like invoices, bills, rental agreement etc. be sure to have the financial aspects cleared up (who puts in how much? who gets how much out of it for what work done)! be sure you have someone who is good at contacting an getting clients... be sure your styles don’t differ so much otherwise there will be endless quarrels and it will be hard to provide a consistend image of your group to the puplic... be sure to have someone on each project who is art directing it...
- jaylarson0
blu dot
http://www.bludot.com/
- MSTRPLN0
Might be of interest:
http://collabfinder.com/- interesting. Looks to be mostly for web designers, yeah?baseline_shift