In a tailor's workshop, cloth is the visible cost and the cut is the real one. An Italian saying has it exactly: cento misure e un taglio solo. A hundred measurements, and one cut.
Design has been priced the other way round for a long time. Clients paid for pages, screens, rounds of revisions: for cloth. That worked while cloth was expensive. It is now close to free.
What remains is the measuring and the cut. The measuring is research, and most of it never shows. The cut is the moment somebody says this one idea, not the other nine, and is prepared to be wrong in public.
So the first thing a client receives from us is short.
Cava 75, a marble quarry at Carrara. Photograph: lucaakalu, Unsplash.