427 - Shop Talk with Billy Baumann and OK Pants

The drum is in the shop but there is still talk to be had. Mark, Billy, and special guest Aaron Sechrist kick off the weekend with some much needed introspection on everything from naming your studio to the wild world of politics. The boys start out discussing the importance of properly pricing your artwork and the practice of getting paid. Even at a high level like Billy all the way down to anyone throwing out your first invoice, this can be scary and a place too many of us make mistakes. With the Republican National Convention wrapping up Aaron offers some insight to its effect on Cleveland and Mark brings up that once we get our pricing down that we will all need to prepare for how the upcoming election will affect everyone's pocket books, including yours. The fun gets ramped back up as Mastercard gave us a brand new logo to laugh at so get ready because this Shop Talk is filled with the ups and downs of a long week of hard work.

Talking Points

  • Do studio names carry any importance?
  • Handing out business cards when your studio name is part professional wrestler, part superhero, part garbage pail kids.
  • Being your own fake agent and harnessing the power to get a whole hockey arena to hate you.
  • Crucial pricing moments in your career and the fight or flight moments you go through before hitting the send button.
  • Competition, pricing, and corporate cosplay.
  • How to price out a creative's value and the importance in hearing the math.
  • Not being taken advantage of by a Non-Profit or anyone else.
  • Sitting 6 million in the hole for Donald Trump to come to your town and transform it into a pacman-esque steel cage match.
  • Weird, artisanal Republican merchandise that no one is buying.
  • Is Mark a Democrat or a Republican and the concept of choosing the best person for the job.
  • How the upcoming election will effect the economy and how to prepare for that.
  • A call for politics to go back to being boring.
  • Secret Panel news!
  • Giving everything you have to your artform... including your body.
  • DDL Drop Ins.
  • What to expect at WMC Fest and the gamble they took with this year's scheduling.
  • Breaking down the new Mastercard logo and how to justify the cost of the project.
  • Staying inoffensive to make trillions of dollars.
  • The damned if you do and damned if you don't mentality in logo design.
  • RGB files with gradients in the CMYK world.
  • Sharing and Mark.
  • Normal people who are geeking out over the Stranger Things type.
  • Saying Bezier out loud for the first time and the difficulty in explaining everyday things you use without the visual cues.