@Just-B Do you make clients pay more for raw files like .ai?
How do you include it in the price actually?
If there’s a final Illustrator (or whatever) file involved in the job, it’s just part of the deliverables they get from me.
Just as an example, let’s say a client needs a brochure. Some might regard the deliverables as only the printed brochures themselves while keeping possession of the original source files. It might even be written into the contract that this is the case.
I’ve never done this. As far as I’m concerned the files necessary for printing the brochure are theirs and I stipulate in the contract that upon full payment, it’s all theirs.
When it comes to the preliminary sketches, ideas they rejected or variations of different things that didn’t turn out to be the final product, no, I don’t turn those things over. If clients want to purchase those things separately, fine, but I don’t automatically turn over that kind of thing since they’re not the final files.
Okay, thank you for feedback ! 
For logos, I deliver the raw illustrator file with fonts used, and versions as needed. But for flyers or brochures I usually don’t unless they ask specifically for them. It would be another price. If they ask for them after I gave them a price, then I would charge for preparing those files to deliver to them (organizing them, labeling, outlining, etc.)
Be careful with that, Samantha.
- To preserve the integrity of the mark, a logo graphic should not ever contain live fonts; not even the “source file”.
- Handing over fonts to a client should only happen when the client purchased a license to use the font, either as part of the project, or prior to it.
@srp2752 I see, I’m just starting so I’m actually still trying to understand how to deliver my work in a proper way.
@HotButton What about free fonts?
Well obviously the licensing issue comes off the table, but for a logo graphic, live font(s) in the file are a potential threat to the integrity of the design, and subsequently the brand image. When graphic files containing live, un-embedded font data travel between computers, the probability of error increases significantly.
Perhaps I already have the font you used in my logo, so I unwittingly fling open the file and take steps toward some form of deployment. Maybe I add an effect, resize the tagline, convert to outlines, and hand it off to a vehicle wrap provider. Later, when my wrapped vehicles come back, for some reason, I suddenly notice for the first time that the logotype isn’t exactly the same as the signage my partner had made a month ago. Then, we recheck the logo design presentation you delivered (and we approved), and neither the signs nor the vehicles look exactly the same as that either?!?
It turns out my partner’s computer had some weird type justification defaults in play when he set up the signage order, so there’s an unsightly gap between 2 characters that wasn’t there in your design. It’s not a huge difference, but it does seem to get bigger every time I look at it. But that’s nothing compared to how bad I (we) screwed up the vehicle wraps. Apparently, I only had a font on my system with the same name as the font you used in our logo. It’s similar enough to pass for the same font, but one of them is clearly another designer’s knock-off of the other.
Why didn’t you just give me a properly designed, locked-down logo graphic that can’t be changed by font substitution?
I help manage a university brand and have to distribute all those logos. We used to give a jpeg, pdf, png and eps in all sorts of color systems. When we updated our logo, we started giving everyone a cmyk and b/w eps and an rgb and b/w png. We have vertical, horizontal, vertical over dark colors, horizontal over dark colors, and another one that’s more spirited than the academic logo and a version of that over dark colors. Our pantone doesn’t convert well and these people are printing from an office printer for the most part. If not, they’re likely printing cmyk. I feel your pain! Once all the departments, offices, colleges, clubs, sports, etc get logos, it works out to be an obscene amount of logos!
Forgot to mention all type is outlined on the eps files. That’s super important. I do that when I send all files to print. Sometimes groups, colleges, etc try to go to the printer to change things without approval (I’m part cop too). I nipped that in the bud real quick and outline everything.
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I see, so the preferable situation is when the client buys himself the live font. I guess you really have to pay attention to those details when it comes to clients with a lot of requirements!
Or you make the purchase on their behalf as a component of the project. The same way a crafter of guitars would bill someone for materials bought and used in building the instrument, a particular, agreed-upon font may be considered among the “raw materials” in the formulation of your graphic design output.
Right. Thank you
I have another question actually. What about JPEG format ? I never understood the purpose of it really…
Well I’m no file format historian or anything, so I can really only offer personal impressions based on experience and observations. I’d preface this by mentioning that the JPEG (stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group) format predates the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format by quite a few years, so if you’re just learning about all this stuff now, it might be natural to question the reasons for the existence of of JPEG when PNG seems to have several clear and significant advantages.
The short story is that JPEG is a compression scheme. In early times of computerized imaging, file storage and general (file transfer) bandwidth were severely limited compared to current standards, and image files posed a particular problem in that it was so easy to grow them to unwieldy sizes. The JPEG (lossy compression) format was devised to address this problem, and gained widespread popularity to the extent that many lay people use it as their de facto term for an image file—any image file—is “a jpeg”.
Nowadays for my purposes, the format might as well not exist. It does nothing that anyone needs, IMO, and is damaging to image data, especially when an image that’s already been written in JPEG (subjected to compression) is re-saved as JPEG (protracting the negative effects of compression). File transfer methods (storage and bandwidth) have outgrown its usefulness, for the most part.
Pretty accurate history of the JPEG file, thank you ahah.
Okay, so I don’t think it is relevant so far then.
Just a word here about “free fonts.” (actually several words):
A lot of them are NOT free for commercial use. Read the EULA or site legaleeze.
If they are not free for commercial use, don’t even think of using them in a logo.
I’ve even seen sites where they specifically say the fonts cannot be used in logos, among other things. Got caught up in that just a few days ago. Very strange, the typeface could be used for a logo with special permission, but if I wanted to take the letters, outline them and create signfoam letters for the client to put on their office wall, the license forbade that specifically by saying “3D objects” could not be made for resale from the letter outlines.
(something to keep in mind you folks with 3D printers.)
I recently had to find Free fonts used by a designer for a project in which I had to purchase a license. Some really off-the-wall things. I never did find one of the designers to pay them for commercial use. Guess what the designer had to do… Yup, redesign with a new typeface.
Not to mention, about 25% of free fonts have really crappy outlines and don’t make it through the print rip process. Some pretty bizarre things can happen. I once had all the glyphs drop out on one client’s job. Another time, just the letter “n.” That was rather i co ve ie t.
And I just recently had a bunch of prints come out wrong because a vendor used their machine font (PC) instead of my machine font (mac) and the word wrap changed, causing words to overset. Luckily it was a small digital run on standard paper.
I also create GIFs and TIFFs in coated and uncoated versions. Here, I explain all the formats I create.
Sorry Colleen, you lost me on this one…
Only the TIFFs in uncoated and coated CMYK versions of the brand colors, not the GIFs.
You don’t work with website design and development, right? JPEG is still the preferred format for website photographs since small size and bandwidth limitations are always a concern.
PNGs work great for some things, like solid-color graphics with hard edges, since its lossless compression retains those solid colors and hard edges. The lossy compression of JPEG can produce a much smaller file than PNG when working with continuous-tone photos. Quality, of course, is reduced by JPEG compression, but that quality loss is a tradeoff made to increase download speed and reduce bandwidth use.
There is such a thing as lossy PNG, but I’ve rarely seen it used. From what I understand, it doesn’t obtain the small file sizes possible with JPEG
Only the TIFFs in uncoated and coated CMYK versions of the brand colors…
Why?
The tiffs will print differently on different media/papers. A proper Pantone spot or CMYK equivalent vector logo would be more beneficial as those at least can be profiled. If I got a tif logo for print, I’d call or email for the vector with Pantones applied (after checking first that the logo isn’t a placed Smart Object. That happens more often than it should.)
If it’s for video, then it would be RGB.