Diagramming Pay

[Dybkjær]

Just a couple of comments:
Payment: I normally consider hourly rate (payment/hours), purpose (is it commercial/a friend/charity/...), do I get anything else (publicity, fun, ...), commercial market price for similar tasks (which of course is the difficult thing to get to know; I would say much more than 15$), skills (how competent are you?), craft or art (unique art is more expensive). You get pay for the job, not for the hours, which means a) hourly rate is for your own check of what you earn, and b) skills/competence is not about how fast you diagram, but at what quality you do it.

Shading/3D: Black~Terror writes:

except where can I shade? The diagrams shown all are "supposed" to be flat, and shading's for if the model's 3-D, right

Diagrams are not supposed to be flat. Try to fold in anything but foil, and you will see that flaps rise a bit enabling you to see the layers, in particular if you look at them at a slight angle. Also, seeing the layers makes it clearer to the reader what goes on.
Dinogami's example is good. You can also see one of mine: http://papirfoldning.dk/temp/sommerfugl-a.svg
which was made for a womens' magazine. Layers are shown by distorting the layer edges a bit, and gradients suggest some 3D-shading. I do not try to maintain a correct drawing perspective or a consistent light source, the aim is make the instructions clearer and the drawings more pleasing to look at.
The above was what I delivered - the magazine did their own layout of the drawings, and for some reason retyped the texts introducing a couple of weird errors. I believe this is a common situation which I try to counter by offering to make a proof reading myself.

Inkscape gradients: Select the polygon. Type ctrl-shift-F which will open the fill-and-lines dialog. In the first tab you can choose no fill/color/linear gradient/radial gradient/patterns. You can edit the gradients, e.g. inserting more stops. Switching linear/radial gradients does not change the gradient definitions, only how they are applied. I you copy/paste an object, the gradient will be copied, duplicate will not. Probably you'll want to uncheck "Prevent sharing of gradient definitions" in Inkscape settings/miscellaneous.

Font: Serif fonts are said provide better readability for body text, whereas non-serif fonts are better for small or low-resolution text. The latter is the reason why sans-serif has been popular for digital media: monitors traditionally have an inferior resolution. However, this situation is improving, so today the choice can be made more freely according to aesthetics and size. For origami instructions I normally use a sans-serif font, and, for portability, often a standard font, unless I know I will send bitmaps only.

[Black~Terror]

Diagrams are not supposed to be flat. Try to fold in anything but foil, and you will see that flaps rise a bit enabling you to see the layers, in particular if you look at them at a slight angle. Also, seeing the layers makes it clearer to the reader what goes on.

When I said flat, I was referring to the shading, not the slightly distorted layers... -_-

The only reason it doesn't look like I have layers is because it's only one section of the diagram. I definitely do incorporate distorted layers to make the diagrams clear.

@Gradients - hm. I'll try to incorporate that in future diagrams... Thanks!

@Font - I'll do my future diagrams with Wingdings for more clarity. xD

[dinogami]

Here's an example of what Dybkjær and I are talking about. For starters, I redrew one of your diagrams:


Comparison by dinogami, on Flickr

What's different? A few, subtle things (that are better in the original than the Flickr uploads, for some reason):


Comparison-w-Labels by dinogami, on Flickr

Layers that, in the real model, and from any normal, human perspective, would not be visible because they underlie other layers, are shown in exaggerated positions, protruding a little bit from beneath the overlying layers. In a real model, most of these wouldn't be visible unless the model was tilted a bit, and that would hide layers in other areas; this diagram is a pure "hypothetical," incorporating aspects from many, slightly different perspectives into one forced perspective. Similarly, the two free, stretched points in the middle of the model are pulled artificially away from the midline of the model, emphasizing that they are two distinct, separate points. Lastly, the two raw edges of the paper that really lie right against one another at the midline of the model have been artificially pulled apart a bit, showing the white side of the paper beneath. These things by themselves enhance the three-dimensionality of the picture and permit the reader to see if their model really does resemble the diagrams.

To be perfectly fair, in your diagrams, it does look like you tried to exaggerate the positions of the stretched points and the small flaps on the left side of the model (it looks like there are two, very closely-spaced lines in each position), and I'm not certain why they don't show clearly. It might be a function of line thickness; try bumping all the line thicknesses down a tad and see if that makes them show up better.

Lastly, as for shading--which I again emphasize is by no means required; it's simply an enhancement that can be left off as long as the kinds of exaggeration shown above are used--here's how it can be used to enhance the three-dimensionality of the diagram:


Shading-Example-1 by dinogami, on Flickr

(Again, it shows up better in the real thing than here, for some reason...) Again, pretend that there isn't a fixed lighting position; anywhere where a layer goes underneath another, where light wouldn't normally go, shading emphasizes that fact. I only shaded a few places here, not all the places where shading really could be used. And there are some places where it hypothetically could be used that it might be left off. For example, the exaggerated layers sticking out from under the stretched point in the middle could be shaded, but it's really rather difficult to shade such a narrow shape effectively. Dybkjær was correct in recommending using gradient fills to create these effects; in most cases, it suffices to create a narrow shape parallel to the flap that has a gradient fill but no stroke width, and make sure that the gradient is at the appropriate angle. (These diagrams were made in Illustrator; FreeHand does more or less the same thing, but I don't know about how Inkscape or other programs work; I assume they have this ability!) If you're doing your diagrams in color, here's another example:


Shading-Example-2 by dinogami, on Flickr

Here, for the layers to be shaded that are of the colored side of the paper, instead of fading to a darker shade of gray, or to black, the same color as the main fill is used but darkened.

I hope this is helpful in some way!

[Joe the white]

Personally, I work as a librarian, but I fix computers for friends, family, and friends of friends, etc. on the side. Its something I enjoy doing and I'm not certified for it, so I just charge $25-$50 unless I have to order parts, which seems ridiculously cheap, but its not like I'm running a business. If you want to help someone in your free time, you enjoy it, and it benefits the art, then I think $15-$20 is fine. If you want to turn it into an official business, I'd look into charging by the hour, and US minimum wage is about $7.50 (so an 8 hour order would be $60), though usually you'd want to go above minimum wage with a specialized business if you're experienced.Though, I'm not a fan of modern big-business, so I'd say keep doing what you're doing and if you feel its not enough, you can atleast follow that sort of pricing as a guideline.

[Black~Terror]

@dinogami - Oh ohoh I see what you're talking about now. Thanks!

I don't think that particular section of the diagram was a completely accurate indicator of my skill since I had some trouble getting the two middle flaps to be separate. As a result, I think I left as it is.

One of the reasons the distorted layers don't show is because the picture I scanned is scaled down, so the smaller distorted layers didn't show as well. Thus, it wasn't a really high quality picture, and it would've looked more apparent at a higher resolution and quality. Line thickness is one thing, but...

[kevin89]

Hmm... I see... except where can I shade? The diagrams shown all are "supposed" to be flat, and shading's for if the model's 3-D, right?

When I draw my diagrams (by hand), I shade like it isn't completely flat, like the flaps are unfolding slightly, to let the reader know that the line is representing an adge, rather than a crease, if that makes any sense.

I've never understood why some steps are given sequential numbers in diagrams when no action happens between them. For example, in steps 22-23 of your diagrams, nothing is happening in the model. Yet the model now appears to be one step longer than it needs to. I could diagram making the traditional crane, showing the model at different magnifications, from different angles, etc., and make it a 100+ "step" model. But different magnifications and views aren't steps; they are different aspects of a single step. There are at least a couple of workarounds for this:

(1) using letter suffixes that provide an additional means of informing the reader that two sets of diagrams are related but not necessarily different. For example, instead of 22-23 in your diagrams, make them 22a and 22b.

(2) Don't number intermediate steps at all. Interestingly, you've done something similar with your step 29--just providing one label, and one step number, to two (or more) different diagrams that show two (or more) different views.

Either one is fine, really, ... as well as not giving an appropriate number of steps for the finished model. (But for that matter, I've never gotten a good handle on whether or not people include a single diagrammed step that says "Repeat steps 18-63 on the other side." as one step in the finished model or 45 steps!)

And me making zoom outs separate steps is just my style... and I have a reason for doing so. I think it's necessary to show the current model before doing anything else to it. If I omit the diagram and the folder has realized he or she folded something wrong, then it might be too late for the folder to correct it (or at least tedious to fix). This is especially apparent when turning the model over as well.

I agree with dinogami, and I don't think dinogami meant to delete the step, but rather to just not number it or merge it with another step. So nothing about the diagram itself changes, but the numbering does change. I agree with you about it being necessary to show the result, as it can add a lot of clarification, but I don't think it should be its own step.

About counting a "repeat steps 24-36" as one or 12, I've mostly seen it as one step. I remember folding the 128? point sea urchin (which completely failed, btw) which had lots of "repeat" steps, as in repeats within repeats within repeats, like inception! and calculating the number of steps, and it was at least 500 steps...

And I will say again for future reference, just in case you guys haven't saw it yet, I already gave the completed diagram of his model to him and got $15 on Friday.

And the picture shown is not the diagram he asked me to complete; it is my own diagram I made for one of my own models. The client's diagrams were made differently from my own style.

At this point it isn't a matter of that model or whether you got payed or not, its about your future models and diagrams.

(fyi: I did delete some of the quote that wasn't related to what I was talking about to make this post shorter)

[steingar]

I might charge $20 and hour for a friend, then again I might not. Diagramming is specialized and slow. Nobody pays me peanuts for work no one else can do.

[Ondrej.Cibulka]

My charge is 250 Kč per hour, it is approx. 15 USD. So for 8 hour diagram it is 120 USD. But it is commerce, for friends it is different.