GD Ethical Quesiton

[Neuro]

A CSR came to me and asked me to send a customer the .ai file for the logo we redrew for them. I work for a large company and I am sure they don't really care about this too much but I feel like it is ethically wrong to just hand this over to the customer. Its obvious they are sending the art to another printer to have something done and want the .ai file for that. I emailed my super about it but it sure doesn't seem right to me! Like I said I don't think this company will give a rats ass about the money but ethically I feel it's wrong. What would YOU do?

'Thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.' - Dennis Miller

[Kool]

Send em the file and be pissed about it for about 5 minutes, then forget about it. /emoticons/biggrin.gif

I love children but I don't think I could eat a whole one.

[Mickey]

That is some solid advice Kool!

I agree

http://home.wi.rr.com/mygraphics/konceptcreative.jpg

[Neuro]

That's what I thought!! ha! I just was curous what you guy thought about this. I obviously don't have a choice but then again that's why they pay us crap. They don't care!

'Thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.' - Dennis Miller

[3howards]

really, what are you gonna do? you work for these people and they, obviously don't have a problem with it. just gotta bite your tongue sometimes ...

'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.' -- Isaiah 5:20

[coconut]

Ethical? Yes. Actually you can look at it this way, especially if you did the work, when you see it printed here and there you can say, 'that's my work'
I do it all the time. I love seeing my stuff all over the place.
I see my stuff on TV, ads, giftbags, mailings, and more and more.


What do I look like a smoken monkey?

[Unit.Seven]

Rasterize the logo and the place it in the AI file, ater all thats what we seem to get when we ask a customer for an eps of their logo...maybe RGB for good measure...;)

[morea]

HA!!!! Hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!

/emoticons/rofl.gif

I haven't lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere.

[Broacher]

Legally (the heck with ethics), if you're employed to create the work, it's up to your company to decide if they will give customers the 'source code' to completed work. I'm assuming your supervisor okayed it, so why are you worried about?

When I first saw 'GD Ethics' I thought this was one of those religious threads.

'Business ethics: the business world's version of Monopoly money.'

[Jason Fraker]

Maybe give them an EPS, but not an AI with fonts intact and everything. The customer buys the right to have artwork to send to printers etc...but you should keep the right to make changes to that art. It's along the same lines as giving a client a layered Photoshop file, you are guaranteeing that you will never see that client again.

-Jason

A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can even put on its shoes.
-Mark Twain

[PrintDriver]

Hold the phone designers....

Maybe they are having a sign made? Who knows?

I gotta tell you, I hate making that call to get someone's logo in vector format from a printer, designer, or another sign company. I usually make the client do it cuz it is their logo and if they want to make a sign out of it and they want me to do it, well, that's why they have a logo.

Also when we do large show pieces or large format printing, we need the vector logo.

And I always thought it was just ineptitude that got me photoshop jpgs placed in Illustrator and saved as .eps. You mean it's intentional???

Broacher is right. As long as you are doing work-for-hire, the design isn't yours but your company's. If the higher ups see no prob sending it out, send it out and forget it.

PrintDriver is a grande format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing

[Broacher]

>>And I always thought it was just ineptitude that got me photoshop jpgs placed in Illustrator and saved as .eps. You mean it's intentional???<<

Gotta admit, that was my thought exactly!

PD, I bet like me, you've become pretty good at trawling Google for PDF files with vector logos hidden in them. This still is the most successful route I've found. Many times I find that designers WILL handoff to their clients AI, EPS or other vector file masters, but the clients don't know have the slightest idea of what these are, or what to do with them and they inevitably get lost or deleted. But it they have anybody doing stuff for them that gets posted on their site as downloadable PDF, that's usually where I get lucky. (God knows, with my work schedule of late, it sure ain't my bedroom!)

[Patrick Shannon]

Many might disagree with me, but I feel is a client has paid for a job and paid for the time it takes to build/create a logo for them, than it is theirs for the taking. It would be like me commissioning someone to install a sound system in my car, but then I can't drive that car off the lot.

But I have bigger reasons for just handing it over, and those have been mentioned already. I (as well as many of you) get so sick and tired of having to scan in artwork or recreate something that has been created already, I'm busy enough as it is with bigger/original jobs. Whenever my customer wants a logo on disc, I give them an EPS, or if it's a bitmap, 300-600 dpi quality. That way, I can feel good knowing that somewhere out there, another artist will potentially rest easier knowing that they're not going to have troubles. I just wish everyone did that for everyone.

I agree with Jason Fraker though, convert the text to outlines (I always do anyway) and let them come back to you and pay if they want something edited.

--
Patrick Shannon

http://www.mywarwithculture.com/images/mwwc_sm.gif
My War With Culture (http://www.mywarwithculture.com)
The Positively Eclectic Online Comic!

[MD]

Excellent points PD & Patrick. You really don't know what he is going to use the logo for. For all we know maybe he is going to get his logo tattooed on his stomach. Really you did not even design the logo, you just re-created it, and I am pretty sure your company got paid to do it. We release eps files all the time - its better to have a customers logo uniform than slightly different. (Of course we are print shop and there are things that we just don't print or are just not competitive on.)

Broacher - I love stealing eps files out of pdf files :) A good place to look is corporate reports