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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Giving Clients Access to PSD’s

I’ve got a ques­tion for any of you with expe­ri­ence in graphic design regard­ing client access to orig­i­nal art­work (in my spe­cific case, orig­i­nal lay­ered Pho­to­shop files).

We have a client who has requested that we send them the orig­i­nal PSD file for the comps we’ve just pro­duced, since they are on a tight bud­get and feel they can more eas­ily exper­i­ment with the design and lay­out if they have the orig­i­nal file, as opposed to just telling us their thoughts about the design. We have a pol­icy in place which restricts access to the orig­i­nal source files, unless a client has specif­i­cally requested that access, and has paid for the priv­i­lege. This pol­icy exists because we’ve been burned in the past by “nice” clients whom we’ve trusted, who have skipped out on the remain­der of a project once we let them have copies of our source files.

I’d love some opin­ions on the best prac­tice for this sit­u­a­tion. How have you dealt with it before? What was the client’s reaction?

Be kind in the com­ments, as our clients read this site too :-)

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Friday, October 24th, 2003.

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11 comments on “Giving Clients Access to PSD’s”

  1. Posted by Arikawa on Friday, October 24th, 2003.

    “unless a client has specif­i­cally requested that access, and has paid for the privilege.”

    If the client has paid for lay­ered Phot­shop doc­u­ments, then by all means pro­vide them.

    How­ever, if the orig­i­nal con­tract spec­i­fied “con­cept and pro­duc­tion” and the client wished to pull out after the con­cept phase, I would take issue with it.

    If you have a gut feel­ing that some­one is try­ing to take advan­tage of you, they prob­a­bly are — you know the client bet­ter than I, of course.

    But I have to won­der about a client who is unwill­ing to com­mu­ni­cate ideas, revi­sions, etc… if they don’t need your vision and exper­tise, then why did they hire you? Seems fishy.

  2. Posted by Lea on Friday, October 24th, 2003.

    Well, I’ve had clients ask to be able to edit the file by them­selves; I merely tell them to print it out on a b/w printer and scratch it up man­u­ally and fax it back to me. Some­times they just feel like it’ll be eas­ier to do it them­selves instead of going through sev­eral channels.

    It might help to do dam­age con­trol by ask­ing for a 50% deposit of your project at the begin­ning before going for­ward and doing the rest. Also, if some­thing unex­pected like this comes up, you can men­tion that you have to get more of your quote up front, or, charge them extra. And men­tion­ing that at the unfin­ished stage, your source files are still your prop­erty. Or something.

    Though, I would look fur­ther into it.

  3. Posted by Grant Hutchinson on Friday, October 24th, 2003.

    This level of access to source files and other related data per­tain­ing to any project needs to be under­stood and agreed to as part of the signed agree­ment. I def­i­nitely agree with Arikawa that access to any­thing beyond comps and final deliv­er­ables should be a paid for privilege.

  4. Posted by Nick Finck on Friday, October 24th, 2003.

    Here’s the deal. While it may seem like the client should always be allowed to mess with the source files. The fact is that the design is yours until they have paid for it. What I mean by that is even if they did “cut bait” after you designed some nice lay­outs, they are (assum­ing you have a con­tract that details what they will pay you and what you will give them in return) required to pay you for the full amount of the project because they have pos­ses­sion of the orig­i­nal works, assum­ing they use the designs. And in such a case, until they pay you for the designs you own the copy­right on them.

    Despite all of these fail-safes, I still have a hard time giv­ing any client my PSDs because it’s sim­ply ask­ing for trou­ble. Why can’t they just markup a GIF with com­ments, or as some­one said, print it out and fax it off? There are even a few soft­ware tools that allow you to draw on GIFs and lay­outs of web pages.

  5. Posted by benry on Saturday, October 25th, 2003.

    With­out a doubt some­thing is fishy here.

    First, they hired you to com­plete the work, not them. If they feel they can accom­plish the work them­selves, then I’d let them and tell them that you’ll hap­pily re-evaluate your orig­i­nal pro­posal and the extra time it will likely take to implement.

    Sec­ond, keep the PSD’s. They are yours. As long as it is out­lined prop­erly in your con­tract — don’t release them.

  6. Posted by Moose on Saturday, October 25th, 2003.

    “This pol­icy exists because we’ve been burned in the past by “nice” clients whom we’ve trusted, who have skipped out on the remain­der of a project once we let them have copies of our source files.”

    This says it all. If they have not paid for the usage of editable PSD’s you can­not risk your time, money and cre­ativ­ity. You are the designer, the clients job is to guide you in your job so they get the desired results. If all they needed was a jump off point for design they can tweak at their own will, maybe that’s what you should cre­ate and bill for.

  7. Posted by damien on Saturday, October 25th, 2003.

    In my expe­ri­ence often the client is sim­ply buy­ing a fin­ished prod­uct and in essence an exclu­sive license to the spe­cific art­work pro­vided. This is stan­dard and should nor­mally be cov­ered by your terms and con­di­tions or what­ever. This does not cover ‘orig­i­nal (source) art­work’ like lay­ered pho­to­shop files.

    In a few cases — some clients do specif­i­cally pur­chase the orig­i­nal pho­to­shop files because they like to do all the pro­duc­tion work and have the orig­i­nal art­work. Most often this involves mas­sively chang­ing things — like new color schemes or what­ever else the pro­duc­tion artist wishes to inflict. And on our side — it requires us to pre­pare those files and build them accord­ingly, per­haps with a styleguide and so on.

    I’ve found that for clients like Microsoft you have to hand over every file, source or not, but that they also stip­u­late that up front.

    It is an easy dis­tinc­tion between orig­i­nal source files — which you may per­son­ally use again and again to develop new con­cepts for other activ­i­ties — and fin­ished con­cepts which can only really be used for the pur­pose they were intended.

    It sounds like your pol­icy is a good thing and should be imple­mented here if for noth­ing else because the client wishes to cut short the design process and ‘exper­i­ment’ with it them­selves — I guess you have to decide which will pro­duce the best out­come for you in order to get future work, either from this par­tic­u­lar client or oth­ers. Sorry for waf­fling on.

  8. Posted by James Mathias on Saturday, October 25th, 2003.

    As has been said many times already.

    The orig­i­nal source files are not part of a deal, unless specif­i­cally writ­ten into your con­tract, giv­ing them access to these sources is ask­ing for trou­ble. I have not had one client that has asked for the source files, and told no they can’t have them com­plain or leave.

    I have on the other hand given them to “trust­wor­thy, nice guy” clients only to be taken for a fool. I have lost sev­eral thou­sands of dol­lars by try­ing to be nice. It does not work. Web dev/design is a busi­ness and the clients (some not all) don’t seem to under­stand that. I have clients con­stantly try­ing to barter, and get things they never orig­i­nally spec­i­fied, which is the rea­son I went to full legal con­tracts. You can’t go to the gas sta­tion and barter for your gas.

    Any­ways, I would just explain that they were not part of the orig­i­nal con­tract and that if they would like them, they may pur­chase to the rights to them for a large fee (I charge $2000 for rights to source), or the other option they have is to explain to you the best they can thier needs/wants.

    Hint: They always go the com­mu­ni­ca­tion route.

  9. Posted by Stéphane Curzi on Saturday, October 25th, 2003.

    I had prob­lem like this before, now I don’t deal with these client any­more. Hav­ing a client ask you the files before you fin­ish is strictly a no-no for me, I do own my work and I would never give a client the pho­to­shop for a website/illustration or any other con­struc­tion files.

    Except if you spec­i­fied in the con­tract that you give a client FULL rights on the art­work, it’s still your prop­erty even after you fin­ish the con­tract. That’s what I tell my clients when there ask­ing for orig­i­nals, they have paid for ONE job that they received, not the abil­ity to do what­ever they want with it.

    If they feel that they cant really explain what they want, then I would sug­gest they find another com­pany to do the work.

    Good luck.

  10. Posted by francis on Monday, October 27th, 2003.

    dan,

    i would politely tell the client that you do not hand over the PSD files until the end of the project.

    what I usu­ally do is include every­thing on a CD upon com­ple­tion of each project. this may or may not include, PSD files, FLA files, stock images, and usu­ally the entire com­pleted site.

    they never get access to these files halfway through the project.

    not sure this helps…but good luck!

  11. Posted by Lea on Monday, November 10th, 2003.

    Oh Dan, I just found this link for you:

    http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup_v2/archives/001433.html#001433

    I just put that there because I’m not sure your com­ments allow HTML. But please check it out. :-)