Designing is the process of crafting a vision based on your wants, needs, dreams and budget considerations. Sometimes this can be a simple concept requiring no more than a basic sketch and other times it requires plans, drawings, specifications, perspectives or even models to fully develop the vision.
Initial visits are free so we can meet and talk with you in order to get a feel if we are the right company for the job without the pressure of money already being spent.
Then it is to the drawing board to develop a first set of ideas. Preparing basic sketches, written descriptions and/or ballpark cost estimates are often a part of our effort to help you decide if we are the designers best suited to help you achieve your goals.
After we review the initial ideas with you there are 4 possibilities:
1. It may be clear that it is time to stop. You have no obligation at this point to go further. Please respect the fact that the ideas and work materials produced represent our creative efforts and are not to be used without our permission.
2. If you are not certain the ideas are headed in the right direction it may be back to the drawing board to come up with a new set of solutions.
3. If the concepts are far enough along we could move forward to defining a scope of work for preparing cost estimates.
4. If more detailed design work is needed we could enter into a design phase with agreed upon fees and timetables.
Once a design is complete and a scope of work is defined we will provide a detailed cost estimate. These will not be "to the penny". Even though we have many years of experience and are good at estimating it is still just an educated guess. We break a job into work items; each having a cost range from low to high. When a job is actually built you can expect that some items will come in low, others will be high and most will be somewhere in between. By addressing all the potential costs up front, with careful planning and monitoring there should be no surprises except for how much better it all turned out than you ever imagined.
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