My friend PJ McCormick, on the designer-client relationship:
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that pricing your work so low is a personal decision that only has an impact on your firm. Because it doesn’t.
Every time you hawk a logo for a couple hundred bucks or throw in a web site for free to get a promised bigger project from a client, you’re making a decision that effects all of us.
You’re creating a tiny tremor that grows in magnitude as it radiates away from you until it hits the rest of us at full force when we have to explain to our clients why we’re quoting the logo you’ll do for $200 at many, many times that.
You are actively contributing to the commoditization and devaluing of our profession and the work we produce.
The whole essay is brilliant. If you charge for design work, you need to print this out and tape it to your desk.