VIP and Premium

What's the trend with GFX artists charging $10 or W/E amount extra to make it a 'VIP'/'Premium' signature, layout, etc.

If one was to place an order for a non VIP/Premium product, would that mean the GFX artist would simply rush it and not invest adequate time into it?

Confused as to why the need for it. It basically comes off as, 'If you don't order a VIP/Premium product, I won't put any effort into it'.

Anyway, just wanting opinions on whether it's a good or bad thing.

 

Well that is what I said. When I did orders I always did them to the best of my ability, with all of the resources I had, and to the exact specifications. I didn't require people to pay more money for me to do the job they're paying me to do to start with. It's pretty much just a way to extort people out of their money by saying 'If you don't pay this extra bit, your sig isn't going to be as good as it could be.' People will believe whatever you tell them and it's sad because there are numerous people getting ripped off, but I can promise you that people are going to come into this thread and say the exact same thing they say every time. 'People can charge what they want', 'You're just mad', etc. etc.

In the end people are going to pay just about whatever you want them to because they want to be cool, then get banned because 90% of the new people that come here and order those kinds of sigs are vaders.

 

I think I understand where you're coming from Sellerman, it does slightly come off as "If you're not ordering a VIP-level product, we aren't going to give you the best of service." While I don't offer any services myself, if I did have this policy of "normal" and "VIP/premium" products, I would probably create "normal" products within a time limit - for example, I might spend 1 hour and be done with it from there. I might spend more time on a "VIP/premium" product, and then ask the customer what he/she thought of it and how I could further customize the piece for him/her. I can see the reasoning behind the whole VIP/premium idea especially for bigger artists in the marketplace - they do have many orders to fill within a limited time.

Of course from my point of view 99% of the work that comes out of the GFX Marketplace is uninspired 3d-replica text enhanced artwork, so there's not much to customize there. So I do agree with you SM, the "VIP/premium extra" does seem from a first glance to be a bad practice.

edit: and yeah, Just as Nero said, some artists may decide to charge extra for their own personal gain

 

IMO, just creates a negative stigma. Each to their own however.

 

Each to their own; I'm pretty sure that they consider themselves as being like any other business where quality of order differs, yet I'm not of too different view from Superman in terms of the quality of work that is sold.

Where money is involved, there will always be controversy unfortunately

 

It's a "business" strategy. And while it certainly isn't a bad one at all, there obviously is a stigma associated with it.

The facade that virtually no effort is put into non-premium or vip pieces is a misconception at best. It's just a matter of the time spent on the graphics being (mostly) proportional to the money spent. If someone offers $50 to do the same thing someone offers $10 for, it would make virtually no sense to give them the exact same quality product. Now the general solution I've seen for this is to have concrete prices to avoid situations like this, but time is money. It's not the fact that people throw a bunch of crap together and charge you $10 if you're not ordering the the same thing for $20; it's just a matter of time being of the essence, so money is used as a determination of how much of it is spent.