10.20.2003
While we were looking at the aforementioned da band website, and checking out the website of the people who designed it, a Madison Ave design firm called pLot, who seem to be picking up a decent amount of music business websites, we started wondering what happened to Kioken, the brilliant and oft-imitated design company that, back around 1999-2000, had racked up some impressive, slick sites for clients like Bad Boy Records, Barney’s, Motown, and Jennifer Lopez, and were rumored to be making unheard-of amounts for their designs. Someone at Gadgetopia apparently had asked the same question back in June, and just last month, Joshua Davis, one of the Kioken designers, filled in the whole story (same link; just scroll down), and corrected a lot of long-standing rumors while he was at it, like how much they made back then. Stories of them charging “upwards of $350,000 for a set of five comps” were common; Josh, however, writes,
don’t believe everything you read - we didn’t make, nor charged the type of prices people thought we did - barney’s was made for about 50k I think.I’d love to see someone blow the Kioken story out into a full article, as it sounds like a lot of what happened to the design profession during and immediately after the dot.com days could be well told in their story. The importance visual design took on in the selling of the Internet and personal computing, the breathless coverage of the people making it happen, who were, after all, designers, but briefly seemed like the stars they were working for, the difficulty even very talented groups often had making ends meet after things turned down in 2001, and the hard fact that September 11 was the final blow for a great many of the design businesses that had started up between ‘95 and ‘99… it’s all there. And in seeing the Kioken team now dispersed, and still working on interesting projects, there are surely some stories about survival and adaptation there that would be interesting to any designers looking to learn about the biz. comments 3
Mr. Diddy is also notoriously cheap even for the music biz… Had an interview with Bad Boy in the boom years, before Napster and the employees were complaining that it was hard to get free CDs of the labels own artists. Every other label I’ve visit has tossed around the freebies like they were made by AOL…
Posted by Abe at October 20, 2003 03:08 PM“Sean Combs obviously has a lot of clout, and he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers,” Mr. Kernaghan said. “This isn’t Kathie Lee selling shirts in Wal-Mart for $5.99. He is selling T-shirts for $40, and you’d expect the workers to be treated better and earn a little more.”
I found this quote kind of funny coming from the director of the National Labor Committee. Like, if you’re making a shirt for $5.99 it’s okay to abuse your employees.
mc
Posted by Michael Ciulla at October 29, 2003 03:32 PMmore shey.net
10.18.2003: seen
October 5th - Falun Dafa practioners freely expressing themselves on the public circle directly across from the Chinese Embassy,…
10.20.2003: wrong turn
For everyone coming here looking for Sara Stokes, we’d like to point you over to da band’s website, now open…
By the way, there’s a funny, arrogant little thing on the pLot site, which Abe pointed out, and struck me as odd, too, which goes something like this:
As we all know how much the record industry throws money around nowadays (witness the episode of “Making the Band II” where the newly signed members of da band have to wait an extra week for their advance checks), it’s hard to believe not over billing their clients is a decision pLot reached on their own accord. Posted by Tim at October 20, 2003 12:19 PM