A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

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)<p>2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Favicons are important, it's a mistake to believe they are always a 5 minute project.<p>(edited to add "always" to the last sentence)

I've charegd a client over $1000 for a one-line script that used SCP to copy a file from one place to another. I even told them upfront it would be a trivial one-line script, and made no pretense it was not a really simple thing to do.<p>But by the time you cover quoting, invoicing, documentation for the change control process and arranging the required access there is a whole days effort spent on the task.<p>Just because something is easy to do in an environment where you have complete control and no need to justify and document changes doesn't mean it's easy to do in a production environment, and that's assuming the icon itself wasn't properly hand-crafted pixel by pixel to get the best result.

£1 for the new favicon, £584 for knowing how to do it.

Some factors to bear in mind before balking:<p>1) The work was done under a support contract, therefore it was probably billed on time and materials and there may also be a minimum or call-out charge (it's the goal of a lot of companies to be able to charge a daily-rate instead of an hourly one). When they say it's not quoted for separately they mean that they didn't put out an RFP, tender it and agree a fixed price beforehand, they asked Reading Room to do the work under an existing contractual agreement at pre-agreed rates.<p>2) If the work is of a high priority then the hourly cost is greater.<p>3) It's a government site therefore they probably have a change management process in place which would mean that before anything touches a production server it has to be signed off. If they do things properly (which I honestly don't believe for a second) then there's no way in the world a developer or designer would be able to touch a production server (let alone two) and this would be someone else's job.<p>4) the design process may have not been as straightforward as just reducing the size. Perhaps they wanted to try it different colours, etc. ? All we can see is the end result and not the process.<p>Of course, they may have just been ripped off. But then so have we by making pointless requests under the Freedom of Information Act which isn't going to accomplish anything more than an inflated sense of our own self-worth.

Somewhat ironic that the favicon was for an organisation called ICO.

If it's for the creation of a new favicon, so that's actually low. Let say, 3 designer hold a discussion together to exchange ideas and mock-ups. They'll need to know what the website is about, what is its' logo, what should the favicon include... If it takes 3 hours, that's 3 x 3 = 9.<p>Then a designer will need to draw the real favicon from that mock-up, don't forget that he'll need to make many resolutions and then tests them. Let say that take 2 hours, including a final discussion with the other members of the team.<p>So in total we have 11 hours, if you consider $150/hour a good rate for a professional, then you'll have $1,650.

If upgrading to a two server environment causes the price of a favicon to balloon to $585, web designers are going to make millions when the government starts hosting in the cloud.

The fact that they were ready to supply an honest answer to the inquiry is pretty cool. Regardless of how steep the cost of that favicon was, I'm impressed by how they can be held accountable for it

"I can advised [sic] you that the work needed to put the favicon live was complicated by an old environment (which has since been updated) that caused issues and extended the time taken to carry out the work."<p>What?

The irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost, likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out.<p>Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than was paid out originally in expenses.<p>£585 is nothing in that sort of context.

If you factor in the time for bothersome, inane e-mails, then their 585 figure makes more sense.

Fantastical coincidence: the most expensive favicon.ico was charged to an organization whose branding is a lowercase 'ico'

You know, making an effective favicon probably would take a lot of time. There is just not enough room. I would say it is akin to shoving a complex program into a handful of bytes.<p>That being said, this particular favicon was not so much designed as resized, and so I totally agree that they got ripped off!

You could assume that the time allocations could be broken down as follows (billable by the hour), which makes it more believable that the total cost could be approx £585.<p>* 1 hour - Account handler discusses with request with client, adds to studio traffic scheduler<p>* 2 hours - Icon development by designer<p>* 3 hours - Developer wrestles with old website platform to try and add relevant &#60;link&#62; to every template<p>* 1 hour - Project Manager reviews and discusses with client<p>* 1 hour - Developer deploys to production environment<p>Making 8 hours at approx £75/h (£600) which all sounds perfectly believable for a London digital studio.<p>One of the issues with the low barrier to entry to web development is that a class of people exist who believe that the job is entirely a process of making a website (or a favicon) and uploading it via FTP, maybe even installing Wordpress. Complex client relationships, business/deployment processes and old web systems do not factor into their equation for cost. It is important that these people exist, otherwise the cost of being involved with the web would be astronomical for businesses at the lower end, but there _are_ good industry practices for quality work and jobs required at the higher end which they are putting in jeopardy with sensationalist headlines such as this one. Some clients have more available money, but require much more effort than throwing up a few plugins and shooting them an email once it is done. Nor is favicon design a case of taking one of my Silk icons are throwing it through a dynamicdrive favicon maker.<p>That said, there are still a few examples of UK website procurement which goes beyond what you might call value for money, such as Birmingham Council's website which cost £3m (<a href="http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-to-2-8m-65233-24307674/" rel="nofollow">http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/...</a>), although my concern with that website was not so much the cost but the quality of the work (from a quick scan I don't have the same concerns about the ICO website).

£0.57 ($0.92) per pixel (it was 32x32 :)

At my current salary, it would take me about 10 days of work to reach £585 in straight labor costs.<p>Honestly, that doesn't seem to be too overly ridiculous to me. There is a lot of work that goes into designing them (and installing them into each page of a website, especially if the favicon was new and not an update). If the company in question didn't have someone perfectly familiar with the site in question, I can see it taking a week or so to get it out the door. What costs would be added by going through the process of taking bids? I wouldn't be surprised if those in themselves ran to £100 - £200.

Am I the only one impressed with the speed and (relatively) decent and detailed response by the government in this case?

I've seen much worse. One being a client billed 7 hours x roughly $150 for... wait for it... modifying a dns entry...<p>This is not a joke, and it was a pretty sizable dev shop here in iceland

If you are retouching a favicon pixel-by-pixel I can see that racking up a few hours: £585 = $944, so if a designer is say charging $150 to work on a complex logo that would quickly add up. It's actually much harder to create something good in the space of just a few pixels as opposed to a social media icon which might give you 100 pixels.<p>By the way I noticed yesterday that Hacker news is going to start a designer's directory because there "are so few good designers". I submit the problem really is that there are so few programmers who can be bothered to learn anything about designers or how they work.<p>In fact the very notion that designers are some secondary set of dumb hands is quite insulting. The reality is that product design (of any sort) should START with a designer and not an engineer. VCs should give more serious thought that an BFA or MFA is worth far more than a CS or MBA.

It only cost 585 pounds to add a favicon to a government website?<p>I'm surprised it wasn't more.<p>Working wit the government is not cheap. It is not easy. It is not something that lends itself to lean development shops. That development work is supporting a bevy of sales and process people to deal with government stuff. 585 pounds is cheap

I'd like to know what the cost of getting this response was, sure the icon's expensive but at that rate it probably cost another couple of hundred to give all this information (I know it's internal and not a contractor but someone has to do it).

Scary thing is I encountered a similar 'issue':<p>The quote was to modify a piece of linux-based kit to work with a regular screen and keyboard instead of a touchscreen. The cost? £3300 for 'development'.<p>I was asked to grab a piece of sample kit and liaise with the development company to have the work done. To cut a long story short, one of the developers called me back a day or so later and gave me instructions on how to change one line in an XML file from TOUCHSCREEN=YES to NO.<p>After I had completed the work, I reported back to the man in charge of the project and queried the cost. He said that since it was being passed to the customer it was not an issue.

I spent a <i>long</i> time trying to get mine right, and it's still looks a bit shabby in my mind - <a href="http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/</a> - I'm not actually that surprised by the cost.<p>This seems to me to be classic non-tech manager thinking - 'how on earth can a 16x16 icon cost that much?!' - but once you factor in all the various factors it's not so obvious. Just because the instinctive reaction is 'that's ridiculous!' it doesn't mean that should override an actual analysis of what might actually be involved.

"the work needed to put the favicon live was complicated by an old environment (which has since been updated) that caused issues and extended the time taken to carry out the work."<p>Sounds like their old CMS system made it difficult to actually add a favicon in the template. I very much doubt the quoted price is just for creating the icon.

My guess is that someone who isn't knowledgeable about web development drew up this list of costs.<p>Perhaps they transposed a list of requirements / features and assigned the breakdown incorrectly - assigning too much cost/time emphasis to favicon design.

I think another government (France?) paid several million EUR for a jingle for the World Exhibition. It was made by the band Kraftwerk, but still.

common guys! the 53 miles of US border fence cost 1B.<p><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41083850/ns/us_news-security/" rel="nofollow">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41083850/ns/us_news-security/</a><p>It is about $300/inch. That would be 53 miles of new favicon/inch ($300 vs 585 pounds - thats 70% volume discount given by Boing to teh US government). Look at the picture at the link above - it is a really hi-tech fence.

&#60;sarcasm&#62;Great point! The government should source all their development work from craigslist from now on!&#60;/sarcasm&#62;

I think this is the company: <a href="http://www.readingroom.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.readingroom.com</a>

I don't know whether I'm disgusted or full of glee that my company is working hard on government tenders.

client -&#62; agency client rep -&#62; in-agency meeting -&#62; agency talent rep -&#62; studio(s) -&#62; studio rep -&#62; studio art director -&#62; studio art grunt -&#62; photoshop / favicon.cc

So is this guy trying to make the point that "design is worthless"?

favicon was not quoted separately, wasn't 585 pounds, non-story

That's disgraceful... I don't know what else to say.

Dude... where i am from... you ask such a question to the government they will laugh to your face ! should you insist security is called... If you come back you will be thrown in jail... On another note... a FAVICON generator website business startup anyone (of course based out of the UK)? lol

This is why the UK is so broke. Corrupt government procurement procedures. Departments overpay like this for various reasons, having to spend the whole budget is a good one. The UK is very corrupt, but our establishment is very good at hiding it and making it all legitimate. Look up some data about Private Finance Initiatives if you want to be really shocked, a £550 favicon is nothing compared to the billions that have been taken from us. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/24/pfi-nhs" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/24/pfi-nhs</a><p>In many of these cases, the procurement procedure is ITSELF contracted out to a third company that will charge a "procurement fee" as a percentage of the value of the final contract. Obviously this incentivises them to pick the most expensive supplier.<p>I'm trying to find a source but coming up short, google gives me pages and pages of worthless drek from the government websites themselves. I'll try to edit in a link later.