The Designers Society of Slovenia issued its last Rules on the remuneration of visual communication design more than 18 years ago. A group of more than 60 of Slovenia’s most prominent design studios and freelance designers has therefore prepared new Recommendations for the Evaluation of Design Services. This large-scale project has come about for several reasons.
In addition to the many substantive gaps in the Designers Society of Slovenia Regulations due to technological developments, the cultural and creative sector has also undergone significant change. In 2017 the number of employees in this sector was almost 52.000 according to the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, while surveys of Slovenian cultural and creative workers show that more than a third of those surveyed receive a net monthly income of between 500 and EUR 1.000 EUR. The rise in the number of designers and the worrying data on income figures with which they make their living point to the plight of this part of the creative sector. The relentless work competition of numerous differently qualified designers has led to absurd variations in both the prices and the quality of the work carried out. In practice, all this can already be seen at a first glance as an impoverishment of the urban visual environment.
The Public Procurement Law has further reduced the professional complexity of design projects by too often using the most economically advantageous offer as the sole criterion for selecting the author. On the one hand, contracting authorities are plagued by a lack of their own expectations in refererence of the ordered copyright work, but they also have problems with the actual writing of the terms of reference in public procurement contracts. The consequences of this kind of approach were to be expected: many public procurements and open competitions were very poorly written, with correspondingly poor results.
No one has been able to address this lack of qualitative norms: neither the design profession itself, nor the growing number of educational institutions. Also virtually absent from the public discourse was the Designers Society of Slovenia, which for years has been unable to overcome its resignation to the status quo and to establish a new membership, leadership and work plan.
The Guidelines for Pricing of Design Services indirectly addresses all of the issues listed above. We have set ourselves the specific objective of reducing payment disparities and raising awareness among authors and clients about copyright creation and related rights. The long-term objectives of the project are to significantly improve the current methods of public procurement of copyright works, as well as to re-establish professional organisations and, last but not least, to strengthen the profession’s position on the current changes in society. Among them is certainly the status of copyright creation and copyright works already created in the era of generative AI.
For the newly published Recommendations, we have taken inspiration from similar foreign tools, while taking into account domestic specificities. For the first time, we have introduced a division of the design process into six implementation phases, defining the fees according to the implementation phase and, for the first time, providing for the royalties calculation according to the volume of rights transferred. The guidelines include recommendations on tariff levels and project implementation, a summary of copyright law for designers and a calculator to facilitate the preparation of offers. The areas currently covered include identity development, publications, packaging, typography, websites and other solutions for the digital environment.
However, the tool is highly dependent on technological and societal changes and will need to be kept up-to-date. Therefore, we are always happy to have new colleagues who would strenghten the team.
Zarja Vintar, idea initiator
Contact: priporocila@drustvo-oblikovalcev.si