There has been a bit of bad press recently, criticising Android 4.0′s new OS-wide typeface Roboto and the similarities it shares with Helvetica.

I too was a little disappointed in Google’s choosing to move away from Droid Sans to something more generic. Droid Sans wasn’t a pretty typeface, but it was quite good for screen reading — more so than Helvetica — and that’s what Ian Cylkowski talks about in the linked article.

Get caught up over at the Design Pro Show homepage.

This question comes across every client’s and web designer’s mind at some point. It’s a bit like asking “How much does a car cost?” and of course the answer is “it varies, “what are your requirements?” and “how much are you looking to spend”. It can be a tricky question to be asked, and what Folyo has done is exactly the wrong way to go about answering it.

Why? Surveying various designers under the pretense of addressing the question “How much does a website cost?”, or rather “How much do you charge for a website”, is price fixing.

Forgetting that the questions only addressed the mockup — “All prices are for design only, i.e. they don’t include any sort of coding (no HTML, no CSS, no Javascript, no PHP, etc.)” — and that a dynamic medium cannot be designed for with a static, non-interactive image: these figures are still pretty damn useless because every client is different and therefore the amount of work required will vary.

Well How Much Should I Charge Then?

1. Work out how many hours you want to work a week.
2. Work out how much money you want to make per week (include overheads in this figure).
3. Divide the amount of money you want to make over the hours you want to work.

Now you’ve got an hourly rate that allows you to give a client an accurate estimate. You might want to do a similar calculation with only your overheads in step 2, which will give you your absolute minimum rate.

Linked to if only for the following:

“Incoming links are good. If people are linking to your stuff, it’s because they think it’s relevant or interesting. It’s the ultimate natural, organic process on the web. Real people, really thinking your stuff is worth showing to others. The message isn’t ‘create incoming links yourself’, you cretin, it’s ‘write something fucking interesting’”. — Matt Gemmell

Mr Case doesn’t half have a point here:

“When people approach me with work that’s very cut-and-dry, but they’re realistic about it, I’m liable to listen. When they act like they’re changing the word with the most important web form that’s ever graced the face of the planet, I run.”