More Artemy Lebedev

Art Lebedev writes about his concept of a Unit of Sense: something new which you create and which requires intelligence to do.

He claims that the average "good designer" produces 1-2 units of sense per month. An excellent designer, maybe four. And an artistic director, at least 6. He also claims that a fair way to pay designers is to multiply their produced units of sense by a fixed dollar value.

"Things like good ideas, interesting concepts and fresh techniques are units of sense. A one-hundred-page brandbook may also be considered a unit of sense - not on a per-page basis, but as a whole."

The concept is really interesting, as it offers a way to quantify designer output, something that's notoriously hard to measure. Unfortunately, his description is itself a little hard to quantify.

Obviously this is hard to apply to anything other than designers, as the majority of work that most people do is perfectly valid work, but simply isn't creative. I guess they should still get paid, though.

One way to think of it is like this: as a programmer, perhaps the interest level you have in your job is a function of your natural unit of sense creativity level, as compared to your creativity level at this job. Or maybe your job satisfaction is indicated by your creativity level, not the other way around.