@HF-Collective : A Meteoric Fall

roo
roo
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

As Frank Ocean famously said, “There will be tears.” Get ready for a gut wrenching story.

Ever heard of High-Fashion Collective?

Spring 2016.

Something was happening. The spot was packed. Well, Michael Gingras and I were the only ones there, but it was April 29, 2016. You know the day. Michael and I were tuned in to OVO Sound Radio, not so patiently waiting on Views. More importantly, Michael and I were embarking on our first freelance web design project. By the grace of god and Michael’s above average networking skills, we secured our first client. Moments afterwards, we resolved to form a design collective, the HF-Collective. The project was to design and build a website for the client, however as time went the project grew in scope.

Just some backstory for you heads that don’t know. Spring 2016 was a momentous semester for us. Never had our web development skills been more polished, never were there more websites to build. Mike and I felt like we could build anything, after all I built the most basic PHP CMS website for my intermediate web design class in about 2 days. I was the anointed PHP god, Michael was the CSS czar. So we made the most logical next move, start a collective. We felt like when it came to web design, were playing chess and all of our peers were playing checkers. I stole the name High Fashion Collective from one of favorite YouTubers and thrift mentor. Sorry Paul Cantu, but the name was just serious and ridiculous enough. We started with the logo, contemplated a dapper site for our collective, but before we could get past square one we secured our first client.

Lets talk about the project. On the surface, it was a simple job. Design a website and build it. There was even no backend required, and if you could see the website the client wanted ours to replace, you would say there was no way we could screw it up. But, the project blew up in scope. What was just a website became a whole re-brand, starting with company literature to be handed out to potential investors. The whole project structure was moved around, now the last step was the website, our bread and butter. Michael and I were not phased, but we were under-qualified. Michael was optimistic, I was pessimistic. We decided to learn Adobe Illustrator as fast as possible and create some incredibly “high fashion” infographics within two weeks. This was not a small task considering the systems programming class we were both enrolled in had work pilling up. However, our priorities were in the right place. Why build a garbage processor in Logisim when you can build a design empire from the ground up? Garbage processors have been built before.

We had the motivation we needed, but we encountered another hurdle that all first time free-lancers may hit. We had to come up a with a price. We didn’t want to sell ourselves and our time short, but we didn’t know how to price skills that we didn’t have yet. I mean, we were getting paid for our first Illustrator project ever, thats pretty crazy. At the end of the day we both really just wanted experience, but the project itself didn’t lend itself to the extremely creative thinking we both thought we were capable of. So we couldn’t classify it as a passion project (aka cash rules everything around me).

We eventually settled on a number. One that was unreasonably larger than it should be, but also one that was probably too small to justify the amount of work we would need to do. Just to note, this was the most stressful part of the project. After sending in the proposed invoice, I was waiting for a response like, “who do you think you are, y’all can’t even use Illustrator. smh.” But that email never came. Usually, I avoid most things that are fake. I stay away from fake friends, fake clothes, and fake money (my friend inexplicably prints a lot of it for fun), but Michael and I were literally faking it until we made it. The thrill was remarkable.

But this story is not a happy one. Unfortunately we never made it to the website phase. Our inflated egos led us to agree to unrealistic expectations from the client. We were working too slow to finish the literature design part of the project. Design-wise we were also relatively far apart, mostly due to fact that our client had unrefined taste (designs were perfect, just ask my mom). HF crashed and burned as quickly as it was created.

Spring 2017.

As Michael and I transition to the More Life months of our lives, we wanted to look back in retrospect at the Views days. The website was eventually created for our client by different (much less talented) web designers. Michael and I are dismayed. The design is boring and the website can best be described as “relatively functional”. Surely we could have done a better and more inspired job than them. While it is regretful that we overcommitted and that our very first free-lance project was unsuccessful, we remained passionate about web design. We also got paid a fraction of our original price out of pity, not bad at all.

The High Fashion boys will rise again, thats for sure. This L will make us stronger and more dedicated. While our egos have taken a well-deserved hit, we don’t regret our attempt at inspired web design.

If you are in need of a website and need two slightly humbled web designers, let me know. Also if you hate this article, let me know.

Views from the Spot (2016)

More Life — roo & Michael Gingras.

p.s. Views & More Life were okay, but Take Care is better.

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roo

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roo

full-stack man

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