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Here's my business card, and my artwork

oksigns

New Member
I just got an order for 23 coroplast sponsor signs.............guess what I got for print files?

Good ol' thumbnails embedded in a 8.5" x 11" pdf. :banghead::banghead::banghead:

Let the games begin.

at my old shop, we had a gym next to us who constantly needed flyers. Once word spread we had same day turnaround on flyers, we had a huge influx of people submitting files... power point files. Like, someone said, "hey, just use power point and make some cool flyers and save some money." It was "fun" having to educate those new customers.
 

fresh

New Member
Here's the thing. Many people have no idea what different graphic files are or why we need a specific type. Not to mention the fact that often a vector version was never produced, so its like chasing a unicorn to get the right file.

If I can reproduce it in less than 10 minutes (which is most logos, we are really good at vectorizing things in our shop), and the job is big enough, I just do it. We get repeat clients all the time because we refuse to make signs, no matter how insignificant, that look like crap. I'll reproduce logos for tournament signage, and guess what, my clients come back year after year for awesome looking golf signs. A few weeks ago I was waiting on artwork from a marketing company, and they were waiting on a logo from their client. It literally took me 6 minutes to redraw the logo. Less time than I had spent emailing back and forth waiting for the last piece of the puzzle.

I also want to add a while back I started adding a line-item design fee into all of our jobs, and if they don't provide production ready files prior to my quote, I make sure to add in enough that if it needs to be reproduced I'm not mad at myself or my client.

My advice is to learn how to redraw things quickly OR always charge a decent fee if you have to outsource it OR stop complaining about it. Its not a big deal.
 

OldPaint

New Member
i did little league baseball/football sponsor signs for many years. they would get contracts with clients, hand them to me with ATTACHED BUSINESS CARDS.......with all the info they wanted on the sponsor signs.
now some wanted LOGOS, and some didnt. i priced them out as such, the plain text were less, the logo/artwork fee was collected by the person writing the contract. i charged $30 more for logo/artwork. most of the logos were.........fast food, car dealers, business's with easily obtained logos.....as i had to cut or paint em............not just simple hit a print button))))))these are all hand painted..........ALL FROM BUSINESS CARDS))))))
 

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Vinyldog

New Member
Here's the situation that inspired my rant: Customer brings in a piece of acrylic from a back-lite sign. With an image already made into the acrylic, (Pepsi) and wants to know if I can print over the existing image, to be back-lite, and the artwork was two different business cards, and one featured chrome as a color so it wouldn’t scan anyway.
Looking back I should have just suggested a fresh piece of acrylic and I’ll use cut vinyl letters to re-create the message without the logos.
That probably would have been fine with them, but sometimes I get so frustrated by what they expect me to do I just can’t think straight.

 

TyrantDesigner

Art! Hot and fresh.
I had one dude roll through with one of the most hammered pieces of plexi ever (from his cow trailer) and wanted to remove the old stuff (probably 6 years old on broken acrylic) and replace it with new stuff from his business card. After I had the removal charge, the new graphics and the materials for removing without entirely destroying or warping acrylic, ... it was about $30 less than new acrylic with the graphics on it.
 
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