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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

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)

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> 1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contractor separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately)

Exactly. The government paid for a website maintenance contract. This was some of the maintenance done. They probably divided the maintenance done by the fee paid to arrive at the figure quoted. This doesn't account for the actual bulk of the maintenance expense, which is "being on call for maintenance requests".

I paid for a snow-plowing contract this year. There has not been much snow. Accordingly, I've paid hundreds of dollars per snow-plowing actually performed. This doesn't make it a bad deal, because the service I paid for is actually not "come and plow x times", it's "come and plow as many times as required for the year".

TL;DR: There's no story here, at all. Zero. At no point in time did anyone write a cheque for 585 pounds for a favicon. It's conceivable that the government overpaid for the whole website maintenance contract but there's zero evidence of that being true. Everyone commenting should be embarrassed.

arguably, the FOIA request cost the government as much money as the favicon, since these employees would have had to dig through old records to gather the information, as well as respond to the emails

As a 'victim' of a few FOIA requests, I can vouch for how much work goes into them. A favicon? Who cares when you've just involved 2 managers, a director and 4 mid-level federal officials? Some FOIA's were beyond reasonable and duly denied, but the reasonable ones could still take days.

Any costs incurred in responding to Freedom of Information requests are the price you pay for not being sufficiently open in the first place. If you pro-actively published everything that people are entitled to know (i.e. that you would have to release in response to a request), then these costs would be close to zero.

touché

Freedom is not free.

I can vouch for this as a former government worker. While FOIA is vital for transparency in government, there is usually quite a lot of man hours put into fulfilling these requests.

As a taxpayer, I'm quite happy to pay for this type of friction. Because the flip side of that is that government employees are constantly aware of the possibility of a FOIA request. I've no doubt it also places overall friction as everyone is constantly in CYA mode (I've worked in govt before) but even still I think the benefits outweigh the negatives. Even tax officials have to be polite to you, even if their objective is to extract a massive fine.

You are of course, correct (as ry0ohki states), but this one FOIA request could lead the way to more competitive favicon quotes from contractors in the future, leaving a net saving for HMG.

Sounds facetious, but it's this transparency that enables public scrutiny (and outrage). The expenses debacle being one such example.

I doubt that anyone, considering how much overhead there is in dealing with a government procurement process, charging anywhere like a reasonable hourly rate, could do it for significantly less.

Oh what, you wanted to be paid to attend that two hour meeting on diversity? Well sorry...

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

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.

See the Colour of the Bike Shed.

You don't really know the back story. Neither do I, but I've been here before, as I'm sure you must have.

What about the 3-5 comps the graphic artist did that were rejected by committee? Let's say there's 5 hours there. Then a meeting where some others sketch up their own ideas which could be done in MS Paint.

Then the artist gets to go back and implement that idea, which indeed probably took 5 minutes. But you still bill for an hour of your time, right? :)

Agreed, its not like the designer was doing some sort of high-detail pixel art or anything. Favicons can take a really long time. They are an art.

However, this one is not even that good of a job. Its a little off center, the font isn't very clear, hard to read. Clearly just a photoshop resize job. I would expect much cleaner work for that price

Is it possible the £585 is a standard fee regardless of simplicity or complexity? i.e. oil change, $40. (no matter it's an easy access filter or complicated filter change)

The period on yours is nearly invisible and the letterforms are substantially different.

Just because you don't know typography doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a profession.

Ok, lets say it didn't take 5 minutes. Lets say it took 3 hours for a designer to make the favicon pixel by pixel, and 1 hour for a developer to upload the favicon to the server (maybe he only has one arm or something, I don't know, bare with me.) That's ~$230/hr.

Really, you can't argue that this wasn't crazy expensive. However, when it comes to government waste this is a pretty trivial example.

Well, you forgot the 2 hour meeting to get approval of everyone involved, then the changes needed after the team weighed in, another meeting for final approval (assuming there was only one round of revisions - this is government here) and then actual implementation. You also forgot the time it took the designer to come up with the original concept - you can't just sit down and produce a production-ready favicon without knowing what it is you're drawing.

So, lets call it 10 hours, roughly? So 58.50/hr...

Bingo.

And there's no mention of the half dozen favicons the designer had to come up with in order to get one through all the layers of approval involved.

Seriously, the icon design wasn't a foregone conclusion. It could have NOT had the inverted colors. Or just had the I. Or something completely different.

Plus, it wasn't an internal project. It was outsourced. That can cut productivity quite a bit.

I dunno, if a company we hired on contract pulled shit like that we'd fire their ass exactly 3 minutes after the first invoice arrived (and of course we would require weekly invoices with written notice if there was deviation from the original budget.)

The UK government has no such contraints of course.

I'm going to assume ~$230/hour includes some pounds-to-dollars conversion I'm not going to do the math to check.

$230/hr is not crazy expensive. It really isn't. At my last job we charged $160/hr for things like "standing around while the phone company is there", or setting up a Dell computer, or sitting in meetings.

The UK government isn't some ramen startup.

Of course, it may be that you can't actually just FTP it to the server. At my current employer, you can't put ANYTHING on any of our web servers without sitting at the console. Which is an hour's drive away from my main office. Security does funny things to productivity.

Who knows? (Apparently the UK government doesn't, either)

Is that security practice widespread? Seems over the top, I mean a big company like Google would have as much to loose as anyone by breaches of business docs and gmail accounts and you couldn't imagine them having to be at the physical data center to deploy.

You should read up on bike sheds if you don't understand how something as simple as a fav icon can turn into a 10-15 hour endeavor. Particularly when the client is a government agency or a large company.

http://bikeshed.org/

Yeah, I've been personally using also like hour or hours on some favicons (and apple-touch-icons), because they're usually hard to make well. Just shrinking down logo or something is not always possible or a good solution.

(Related on the Youtube favicon subpixel optimization http://typophile.com/node/60577)

There's a lot of stuff I can do in 5 minutes. On occasion I've only done 5 minutes "real work" in a day.

What you're paying for tho' is my 20 years experience, and in those 5 minutes I was composing a command line for a tool that I've spent 5 years working on. Bargain?

You know, when you split it like that, it almost sounds plausible.

So, I looked closely at the PDF:- -"Web development work (Logo and fonts £2,317.50, Favicon £585, E-newsletter £1,080)"

Creating a favicon costs a quarter of logo and fonts? That is literally unbelievable.

Your reasoning has merits but I think they (the web design company + those who commissioned them) do not merit it.

Working for the government, I've seen some fleecing in my day. If contractors bid on a job, they have no problem charging 5X, 10X, or more than what they would in the private sector. Sometimes, it's the government agency that is to blame. Some decision makers will not bid out the contract, but will only give it to a select contractor (no-bid contract). I always assume that these decisions were influenced by bribes or money under the table...something!

Case in point. Accenture bid on a fairly complex web application for tracking "containers" that get transferred to private companies, but ofen the "containers" aren't returned back to the agency. Knowing they were the only contractor bidding on this project, Accenture's bid for this web app was over $5 or $6 million! Last I heard the project was still going through. It's sickening to think about it. That's a lot of money for a small, somewhat complex solution. Any advanced enterprise Java developer could do this project by themself within a year's time for 3%. It's a shame, I say!

Let's do it this way - if I'll make you 50 pixel perfect fav icons in a day you pay me £100 for each one. OK? (It's a huge discount...)

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