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dog nougat posted:Got approached last night by a guy who's interested in having me illustrate a hipstery, touristy map of local New Orleans spots. Not sure on much of the details yet, but assuming he actually gets back in contact with me this could be a really good opportunity. Seems like he works for some sorta design firm here, he showed me a picture of the previous map they'd commissioned so it doesn't seem like he's just blowing smoke up my rear end. Everything Defenestration said, plus my two cents: Have a "kill clause" that specifies how you'll receive partial payment if the project is cancelled before completion. Mine also specifies that if files are already completed and ready to be delivered, I am still owed full payment (Defenestration already said this but I think "kill clause" sounds more bad-rear end than "bailout clause"). Specify different stages as milestones - sketches completed, linework completed, final files ready, etc. - and make client approval, as well as partial payment of the fee, mandatory at each stage before continuing. This ensures that if your client wants to go back and, say, change the entire layout after the linework has already been completed, you can point to their approval of the previous stage and either negotiate for more money, or not have to do it. Also if your client bails, you've already received at least a portion of the money from them. Specify how many days the client has to give approval, and that any delay on part of the client will delay the final delivery accordingly - that way if they are late giving the OK, you're off the hook for delivering a late project. Make sure to hash out who will own the rights to the final image - consider how many people will be seeing this and how often, and try to frame that as a separate cost in addition to your hourly rate. As a design firm they will probably want to own the rights to the final image. If they want to put this on a big 4' x 3' placard in the middle of a touristy section, ask for more money than if it is only printed as a trifold brochure available at a specific hotel. Also specify in writing that you will retain the right to display this for self promotional purposes (portfolio site, printed portfolio, etc.), and that your name will be credited alongside the image every time it appears in their publications. It all sounds a lot easier than it really is, but you get better at negotiating the more you do it. Just remember not to sell yourself short or feel bad about asking for money - this is a business operation, this guy represents a company, just do it and get paid. Good luck on that!
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Aug 30, 2016 16:48
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Yeah, they probably need at least a couple business days (that's business days, not long-weekend-with-a-federal-holiday days) before they'll get back to you. Calm down, breathe. It will be OK. Personally, I would send a short email next Monday if you still haven't heard anything by then. As for the contract, it's good to have a base contract form written up so that you don't have to write up a brand new contract from scratch each time. Standard clauses like kill clauses, milestone definitions, etc. can be written up ahead of time and then new dates/names/timeframes can be plugged in based on each client. However, I would not go to the next meeting with this client with a copy of your contract printed out expecting them to sign - typically, you discuss the terms specifically with the client before sending a written contract with those terms included. Coming with a sample contract could be good, just be prepared to mark it up a bit according to both of your needs. Also no, you are not overtly loving yourself - a lot of companies and firms want the rights to what you design for them, some are OK with letting you keep ownership and only granting reproduction rights, just talk with them and see. Just make sure that you are comfortable with the payment received for whatever rights you sign away.
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Sep 6, 2016 09:58
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Sucks man, better luck next time. You did everything right though, there will be other clients in the future.
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Sep 7, 2016 21:59
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oliveoil posted:Does anyone have any idea how much the per-portrait cost would be for each of those three games in Format 1: Character portrait? How much would I expect to pay for a single sprite sheet for each game listed in Format 2.: Character sprite* sheet? Does asking for 20 characters (portrait + sprite sheet) mean I need to spend more to find someone who won't disappear halfway through? Does asking a consistent style imply the same? Thank you for any advice you can give! I'm not sure i completely understand what you're asking here, but the price is going to be dependent on a lot of things - the physical dimensions of the portraits you want, the level of detail you need in each portrait, and how much design work the artist will have to do will all affect your price. I can tell you right now though - a sprite sheet with an 8 directional walk cycle, attack animation, and idle animation will be an order of magnitude more work to produce than a single character portrait. If the artist in question has to design the characters as well - as in, you don't have any "final artwork" images of them in the style you want, model sheets, turnarounds, etc, you're looking at more than double the amount of work as well. If I understand you correctly and you want 20 character portraits and 20 sprite sheets which each contain at least 10 different animations, you're looking at well over a hundred hours of work- if the characters are already designed, modeled, and have turnaround poses created, that is. If the artist has to do all that as well, you can expect to more than double that estimate. Add in more time for corrections, revisions, etc. and you're looking at a huge amount of work. I would write up a list of exactly what you want the artist to create - including a list of each image you need, pixel dimensions for the portraits and sprite sizes, number of frames for each animation, and present that to potential artists. Be prepared for some higher estimates than you might be expecting - over the last 10 years, my hourly rate has fluctuated between $20 and $50 per hour, depending on how desperate I was for work at the time, how quickly the client would respond to me sending a bill, and how likely I thought the client would be to bail in the middle of the project. EDIT: TL;DR - the cost will depend as much on what you want produced as the artists you seek out. Make an organized list of what you need and the dimensions of each thing and the artists will be better able to give you a solid estimate. Also if you share what your maximum budget is an artist could tell you what they could do for that price. gmc9987 fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Nov 13, 2016 |
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Nov 13, 2016 22:30
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kedo posted:Also, that type of site doesn't cater to professionals in the first world. They're filled with folks who live South America/eastern Europe/Asia who can work for pennies compared to their American/western European counterparts due to a lower cost of living. I can count the number of times I've heard of someone getting a good project at a reasonable rate through Upwork or similar sites on zero fingers. You may have a hard time competing with them in terms of price. I stopped trying to find any work on E-lance, Upwork, Freelancer, and all those other websites because 50% of the jobs were given to people who can afford to work for less than $5/hour, and the other 50% of the jobs all have a description somewhere along the lines of "I need something designed, please design it" with no further details about what it is. My wife continues to use those sits to find work, however she's able to find slightly better clients because she's German and she exclusively seeks out jobs written in German - if you're able to find clients who don't, or don't want to, speak English you can typically find better quality work that way. Not great work, mind you, but better than the average. Those sites were too much work for me to put effort into so I stopped. I haven't missed them.
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Feb 18, 2017 20:40
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BJPaskoff posted:The marketing firm I do most of my projects for has a problem: Their sales people write most of the content on the sites for the clients. They don't want to go back and forth with the clients, and of course it takes forever for clients to send content if they do write it themselves. The trouble is, the content that the sales people write isn't always the greatest. Tons of spelling and grammatical errors, writing things like "for over 23 years..." in some places and "for over 24 years..." in others, sometimes even writing the name of the client's company incorrectly. I don't want to fix these things because I'm just being paid to design the site, but I want to propose to the owner that I charge a little extra to fix some blatant errors. Freelance editing is a thing, if this is a problem that is actually costing the company money I'd mention to your bosses sending all text through an editor or editing service before it goes live - I work for a client deals with tons of scientific text, and have worked for companies that regularly need translations, and all of them have 2 or 3 rounds of editing before we're even allowed to show the client a rough. If your boss is cheap, or doesn't see why this is a problem, don't expect them to pony up a bunch of extra money to do it. Whatever their decision, I can say from personal experience do not just edit text, and don't offer to do it as part of your job. It'll drive you crazy having to read it but if you take on the responsibility for fixing the text you'll take on responsibility for the inevitable mistakes as well, this goes double for if you make any changes without your boss's or the client's approval. it seems wrong but you're better off letting content be handled in its own pipeline, regardless of how much you like the end product. fake edit: definitely bring to your boss's attention any misspellings in copyrighted and trademarked stuff like company names, slogans, etc., but if you get told to leave it alone, leave it alone. It's a giant headache once you get brought into the editing process in the middle of a project. gmc9987 fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Feb 22, 2017 |
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Feb 22, 2017 01:22
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Jimlit posted:Not sure if this is the right thread for this but I'll ask anyway. Do you not have the source files for your old websites? It would probably look better to host them yourself than have wayback machine links. Did you sign an NDA, or is the contract work you did not for a public-facing website? You're normally able to put things on your portfolio even if you did them in the employ of another company.
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May 18, 2017 08:02
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The artist could have been (a lot) more professional by offering a contract, doing business exchanges through email or phone calls rather than DMs on twitter, etc., but you were similarly unprofessional by not searching out a competent artist who was also competent at running a business. The warning signs that this artist wasn't taking things so seriously were there to begin with, and you just sent them the full price of the logo beforehand without even getting anything in writing or any way to contact them outside of a social media website that will allow them to immediately block all contact from you with a button press. I hope you can understand how that might imply to someone else that you were not taking this totally seriously. My advice for avoiding this situation in the future is to not just send $50 to some rando on twitter who can't even be bothered to set up a business email address, and to only start work after getting a contract signed.
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Jul 1, 2017 13:03
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Love Stole the Day posted:Am working on a video game project that is all programmer art (i.e. cylinders and cubes everywhere) and is about 80% feature complete, programming-wise. It recently got its first Patreon supporter and every month I get a few people here and there asking to help with the project, art-wise. I tell them that I'll keep them in mind but I'm a broke loser irl so the real reason is that I couldn't afford to pay 3D artists anything close to a market rate anyway. I already know that the whole royalty/revenue sharing thing is a joke in both the art and programming communities, so I know not to even consider it as an option to begin with. Funding-wise, are you looking to fund this entirely out of pocket? Have you considered other options like kickstarter? If your goal is to eventually secure funding from another source, I'd consider doing exactly what you outlined in the second paragraph - secure a tiny bit of funding to make a very narrow but polished slice of the game, use that to get more money. Even getting someone to do a couple pieces of concept art (just the initial concept, not even anything that could end up in the game) could help quite a bit, when paired with a feature-complete demo. Alternatively, see if you can build a simplistic graphical style into the gameplay - Thomas Was Alone is a great example of what I mean here. I know that's maybe not a realistic option depending on what type of game you're making, but really since you're determined to be a decent person who doesn't take advantage of artists (thank you for that, by the way) there's really not much else for options.
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May 29, 2018 17:02
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Vermain posted:
Hope this helps, good luck!
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Jun 26, 2018 11:10
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Fart City posted:Hey all, hoping I can get some advice. Can't give any advice about running a kickstarter, but I can say that when I am looking to back one, I mainly look for:
In short I want to back someone who is likely to deliver on their promise, and who won't run into (avoidable) unexpected costs or delays during production.
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Aug 12, 2018 22:02
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BetterLekNextTime posted:Hopefully this belongs here... Looking for advice on pricing a custom job. My initial opinion: You're selling the other calendars at a profit because you took the time to design them and take the pictures without being paid for it. If you're being paid to design a custom calendar, that won't be for sale elsewhere, and is a seriously limited-run type deal that will probably cost more per calendar because you're only ordering less than a dozen - I would just include the calendar at cost and charge an hourly rate (or what you estimate the flat-rate equivalent is) for the design time. I'd also include that the client has to pay for one more copy than they want in the end, for you to have one for your portfolio.
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Oct 17, 2018 20:17
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If the client wants reprints later on down the line, you can discuss a per-calendar or flat reorder fee then.BetterLekNextTime posted:Whoa, now I'm a graphic designer! Welcome to the party, it's the kind of party where everyone mooches off your beer and cigarettes and then sends you to buy more while they keep partying.
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Oct 18, 2018 14:32
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For printing, you'll usually be able to get better deals through online printing services because (much like Amazon) an online service doesn't need any customer-facing physical space, and can also consolidate larger numbers of orders into runs so the overall cost is cheaper. But, you don't get to talk with the designer handling your printing, and if you choose to order proofs you have to wait for them to be mailed to you instead of just running down to the local print shop. Ideally, it'd be good to have a good online printer AND local printer, so you can pick the one that best suits what you need (a high quality art print? 10,000 business cards? T-shirts?) for each job. I've had good luck with the few online printers I've used, unfortunately I don't have many useful recommendations for you since I live in Europe (I'm assuming here you live in the states). In terms of online stores, there's a couple different varieties. Sites like Etsy or Dawanda (German etsy, basically) function only as a marketplace, where you keep physical stock of your items in your house/garage/shed and when someone pays for one, you go dig it out, package it up, and mail it to them. Other sites like Society6, Inprnt, and Redbubble will take a larger cut of each and every piece of art you sell, but the advantage is that they also print each order on demand and ship it so you don't have to keep any physical stock on hand yourself. One other thing: Getting a single print made is likely going to be relatively costly, especially if the piece is larger than A4. Each individual print gets cheaper the the more you order at once - I had an A3 illustration I got printed a while back, and a single print was something like 30€. Getting 15 prints was 36€, 30 prints was 40€, and so on. So while you might not think that you're going to sell more than just this one print, in terms of cost per print I usually end up ordering at least 15 just because it's only a few bucks more. You can go from 30€/print to 0.40€/print pretty quickly.
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Mar 20, 2019 18:04
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BetterLekNextTime posted:I've been a super small time nature photographer coming up on the 1 year anniversary of my business. Most of what I sell are inkjet greeting cards that I sell mainly in-person at markets and festivals and on Etsy. This past weekend I was set up at a neighbor's house for an open studio event and someone came up saying she was a "broker" and that she worked with a some new-agey boutiques and gift stores to stock cards and such. I don't have all the details yet, but it sounds like she would shop around my cards and then take ~20% of the wholesale if any store places an order, and she would keep up with the re-orders. 20% wholesale seems like a lot to me, but I haven't one any research into what's normal so I have no idea if it actually is or not. Fortunately, the second question is much easier. There are a lot of free and pay options for making barcodes out there, from dedicated software to websites that spit out .svg files to place in Illustrator or InDesign. http://online-barcode-generator.net is one that I've used in the past that works fine. Just make sure that you're sizing the bar codes properly, and leaving enough white space around the edges for the scanner to properly read it.
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Jun 19, 2019 22:14
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Come And See posted:I'm a writer who's looking to commission artwork of my characters. I've never done anything like this so I want to ask the right things without making an rear end of myself. You can o whatever you want, so long as the contract spells out usage rights that both you and the artist agree on. One thing you might want to keep in mind, though, is that it will generally be faster for the same artist to make those changes rather than bringing an entirely new artist up to see on the background of the character and then expecting them to match a similar style to your first artist. Is there a particular reason that you're planning to have multiple artists design the same character?
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Jul 2, 2019 17:37
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What your "friend" did regarding selling the portraits of other characters was kind of scummy, and is exactly the kind of situation that having a written contract in place beforehand helps to prevent. In terms of rights, you can negotiate whatever rights you want to in the contract - it can be as complex or as simple as you need and you can transfer all, some, or none of the rights. Typically, the more rights you want to retain for yourself, the more you can expect to pay the artist up front. FWIW, when I do contracts the client normally only gets reproduction rights - that means that I retain the original copyright, but the client is free to use the artwork in whatever fashion they want to. I also typically include a clause for first revision rights - if the client wants to make changes to the artwork after it's finished, the contract says that they have to contact me first and give me the option of making the revisions, if I decline then they're free to find another artist to do it. Note that this doesn't include creating derivative artworks, just revisions to the already completed artwork. I supplement or alter these rights based on the client and situation. It shouldn't be a problem to write up a contract that gives the artist reproduction rights while you retain the character and likeness rights (this allows the artist to use the image in their portfolio or promotional materials, while preventing them from making a direct profit from selling the image to a different entity).
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Jul 3, 2019 12:12
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Jazz Marimba posted:Last year I got a large format printer for printing out 11x17 sheet music scores. A friend just asked me how much it would cost to print 300qty 7” record sleeves. He would be supplying the paper. I’m not sure how much to charge for that (or anything really), or where to look up standard rates or how to calculate them. Help? Maybe I'm confused, but this sounds like a friend wants to borrow your printer to print something that he already designed and bought paper for? Just charge him the cost of however many ink cartridges he ends up using, or just tell him to purchase a few beforehand in addition to the paper since 300 copies is going to use up at least a few at high quality settings. Unless he's asking you to do something that takes substantial amounts of time away from your own life, like designing the record label for him (or if he's more of a "friend" rather than an actual friend), I don't see any reason to charge him more than the cost of materials.
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Sep 27, 2019 07:31
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Ritznit posted:Yeah I'm afraid that's not feasible. This isn't a mascot intended for one specific marketing campaign, it's meant for a product that will be sold to different companies. The mascot is basically meant to be the face of the product. So, I don't think I can ask for a percentage considering the product was going to be sold anyway, and it's hard to determine whether it was the mascot or the actual product features that clinched the deal. Well, I can't give you specific pricing info but it sounds like you're on the right track. For full rights, I'd say that even 2x or 3x the price you'd normally charge for repro rights wouldn't be insane. Also make sure to specify in your contract that you have the right of first refusal (pretty sure that's the right term I'm looking for, someone else please correct me if it's wrong) when it comes to producing new artwork of the character or making alterations to the design - you want to have it in writing that the company has to give you the option to produce the new artwork and can only seek out another designer if you are unwilling or unable to take on the work for whatever reasons. For anyone looking at the thread wondering why full rights transfer would cost more than just reproduction rights when it's the same amount of work on the designer's part (I know I used to wonder that when I was in school): Basically, every right you transfer to the company in full (the right to use it in any media they want, the right to make alterations to the design to suit new uses not present when the initial design was completed, the right to produce new artworks based on the original design, etc.) allows the company to make more money off your original work, without consulting you. The additional money isn't being greedy, it's you offsetting the fact that you're giving the company the ability to make more money off your artwork without your input.
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Oct 2, 2019 11:47
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Nov 18, 2019 23:37
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They basically told you, "I only intend to share it with [group of people so vaguely defined as to be useless in guessing how many people it is]." I would say don't let this person post it online unless it's an image that you're willing to have publicly online, forever. If you're OK with that (and you can be, if you want) then go for it. But MtG isn't exactly an unknown game with a small community, and anyone who sees the image online could potentially save the image and share it further. Or crop your credit off of it. Or upload it to one of a million print-on-demand sites that don't bother checking for copyright when letting people sell prints on them. So there's nothing inherently wrong with having your artwork posted online, just be aware that there's potential for it to spread beyond the intended audience or usage, and if that's potentially a problem then you're better off not giving this person access to your art. Also, what does this: Sk8ers4Christ posted:They claim they do not plan to make money off of it, and it's just a hobby. mean? This person's hobby is to post other peoples artwork online? Or they play the game as a hobby?
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Nov 19, 2019 15:34
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Ahh cool. Glad that worked out for you, the way you wrote the initial post I didn't know the image was already viewable online.
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Nov 21, 2019 10:18
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:It's a fairly clean scan, but I'm assuming she'll be tracing everything by hand. It's a moderately detailed, but not especially complex line drawing. I don't call myself an artist, but I've put 3-4 hours into it, most of which was tracing new drafts from the first one. If the scan is clean and high-res enough for printing, Illustrator can do a pretty good job of auto-tracing in two colors with a press of a button. I would say to offer an hourly rate of ~$30USD/hr. with a minimum payment of 1 hour. Even if she only has to hit a button to trace it, she's doing you a solid and you sound like someone who values artistic work and not taking advantage of family members so… And if she has to trace it all by hand for some reason, she won't get shorted out of some money. If you think she won't accept a price that high (which isn't actually that high but students/beginner artists often critically undervalue their work) then maybe don't mention the price to her and just ask how long it took and then shove the money in her hand (or bank account) and run away before she can refuse. Also nice av, I love that music video so much.
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Feb 21, 2020 13:08
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Xun posted:Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but what is generally considered an "appropriate" amount of time to ask for an update from an artist? I recently tried to commission an artist for a single piece and they requested that I send the money on the 29th of June and they'll start working from then. Problem is since then I haven't heard anything else. Not even a confirmation that they got the payment I sent (or if there was somehow a problem on PayPal's end). One week is long enough for them to respond, feel free to send another email at that point. Also how much money are we talking about here? That will generally inform the tone that you should take from here on out. In any case, professionalism is a two-way street and even a quick response like you mentioned should be pretty standard to a normal, polite inquiry.
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Jul 28, 2020 14:15
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