People asking for logos...I'm getting irritated

[Stacey K]

Small town where everyone knows everyone. There's that ONE lady in town who makes shirts out of her house for her students and random things here and there and she's a teacher at school. Well now she must be making banners too. I had 3 phone calls asking for logos for a dance team banner. I'm hesitant to be rude about it and not send them. The customers all paid for their artwork but if I'm not making the banner then why should I be supplying the art for it. The problem is if I say no then she goes back and tells the customer and they get mad a ME since they paid for the artwork. The other hand is that's what sucks about doing sponsor banners is you don't have all the logos and if the customer doesn't give them to you then you have to vector them or reset them - like the rest of us have to do. GRRR...maybe I'm just being crabby about it...mostly the woman thinks her crap doesn't stink so I have an attitude against her already.

 

[weyandsign]

You have a couple of options here: 1: Tell her you'll send it asap, and just never send it. Say something about spam filter blocking it or something. 2: Tell her you can't find it at the moment and you need more time to find it. 3: Or just send it, let the woman make her $99 banner or whatever and forget about it.

 

[chester215]

Give them a low resolution JPEG, she can recreate it if she can.

 

[Boudica]

I vote for option 2. "Have been really busy, I haven't had time to look for them" go pound sand
Is this the lady that you were giving vinyl scraps to?

 

[Notarealsignguy]

Booger up the file and send it to them. At least make the lady work for it. Send it in a weird file format, disconnect nodes, add in a million nodes, hide a real large file behind it, make it a BMP, then autotrace it and send them that. There are ways to be an arsehole and still appear nice. Then just play dumb and blame on software compatibility issues.

 

[Saturn]

Send the files and move on. Can't win every battle, and trying to "win" this one might do more harm than good. Sounds like she's mostly doing cheap stuff for the school, I don't know that the high road or low road are going to do you any good against that.

An 8x8" 150 dpi flat jpg would probably be a nice compromise to everyone's sabotaged files...

 

[sardocs]

You could just charge a standard "File Transfer Fee". It takes Time to dig up logos, convert to pdf or jpg or whatever and create an email with the attachments. Charge $35 or whatever you need to cover your time and make the process profitable. Spending time to send them something they cant use is a waste of your time.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I'd tell them... yes, I can send it but it's $175 per file. I had to do extra design work for your banner last year that I didn't charge for, but wanted to make the investment to earn the repeat business. If you'd like that file without ordering a banner, I need to be covered for that unbilled time.

 

[gnubler]

You guys are evil and I love that.

Down-res it to about 8dpi (aka postage stamp) and send that over. Say "That's all I have on file". I mean, that's like 99% of the files we get from customers anyway.

 

[Johnny Best]

Tell her you bought a new computer and it uses Linex OS and nothing seems to work to transfer artwork. Tell her as soon as you figure it out you will put something together for them.

 

[Gino]

There's quite an easy fix for this kinda scenario. Back in the day when gerber, anagraph and some other software packages were on the scene, they had very proprietary setups. You could give someone your file, but they had no means in which to open it, so just use the same idea and tell them your files are in a proprietary system and while you can use them for her jobs on your software, you'd hafta convert them somehow to use on someone else's, using a different software package. It'll take some time and that'll cost ya. Then, y add..... what are ya having done ?? Maybe I can do it for ya and save you that cost. What did they quote you ?? If they shut up, then let it take 4 months to do it and charge her $295.00

 

[Zendavor Signs]

You could just charge a standard "File Transfer Fee". It takes Time to dig up logos, convert to pdf or jpg or whatever and create an email with the attachments. Charge $35 or whatever you need to cover your time and make the process profitable. Spending time to send them something they cant use is a waste of your time.

I like this. Don’t be purposely difficult, people will see through that. Just be upfront and tell them you need to charge a small fee to cover your time.

 

[Stacey K]

I sent her jpegs 8"x8". I didn't want to but since it's a small town being a "B" could lose me more business than just sending them. I'm not doing it again without a fee.

 

[Humble PM]

Too late now, but take file,cConvert to prophoto RGB. Assign sRGB. On a cheapass screen, they might not notice, but print results likely be less than pretty (assuming their printer is capable of printing colours half way accurate).

 

[Boudica]

I sent her jpegs 8"x8". I didn't want to but since it's a small town being a "B" could lose me more business than just sending them. I'm not doing it again without a fee.

Good call.

 

[Solventinkjet]

Booger up the file and send it to them. At least make the lady work for it. Send it in a weird file format, disconnect nodes, add in a million nodes, hide a real large file behind it, make it a BMP, then autotrace it and send them that. There are ways to be an arsehole and still appear nice. Then just play dumb and blame on software compatibility issues.

That's savage. I couldn't help but evil laugh when I read it lol.

 

[petepaz]

i would tell her to have the customers contact you. you don't just give out customer files/logos with out consent of said customer. if they did pay you an art design fee you really should give them a copy of the file. that's what we do.
if the logo they have is that bad then we will trace or recreate it to be vector art and then charge like $200-300 depending on time and work involved. again if you charge them for that in my opinion they paid for that logo and should have a copy. with that said if they did not pay a separate art design fee and you just did the job and reworked the logo to work for the job then they would need to pay a fee to get the vector files. also now that you have the customer on the line you can inquire to why they didn't have you make the banner?

 

[CanuckSigns]

I have 1 client who treats me like Dropbox, once or twice a year she emails me asking for a vector copy of her own logo, she still orders quite a bit of stuff from me, I have no idea what she needs it for, but I have it saved in my documents so I can just quickly grab it and send it.

I dont charge her because she still buys stuff from me, but if she didn't I would charge her a file retrieval fee.

My bank informed me yesterday that they charge me $2 to make a government tax payment through online banking, but I can go into the branch and pay it in person for free, so aparently people are used to paying stupid fees so I wouldn't worry about it lol.

 

[ikarasu]

A sales rep came to me today - said the guy who we designed a logo for (and also bought 1000 12" stickers, 1000 6", a handful of magnets and some idotndecals) total of like $3000 worth of product, is asking for a PNG and vector file of the design we gave them. She asked me how she can explain to him the artwork belongs to us...

I told her the guy was ecstatic with the design we did and loved all the stickers - then reminded her that he was asking us to make some shirts with the logo, but we don't do that and couldn't find anyone with shirts in stock... So he likely wanted the logo to make shirts.

There's a chance we'll get more business from him, refusing to give him his logo will destroy that chance... We made more than enough money to cover our artwork cost, so why not give it to him even if legally we don't have to?

I don't think I'd send a competitor our files without at least calling the client and asking if they approved it - but being difficult usually ensures you'll never get future work.

Let your quality speak for itself - if your price is fair and work is good, they'll be back. Most print companies who sell for nothing are garbage, the prints look like crap or they're not making enough and will close down soon anyways - keep it civil and make sure they come back for other things!

 

[bob]

Why not simply be honest and tell them that, while you do indeed own the artwork in question, it's unethical to send artwork for person A to person B without the express permission of person A?