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Really sorry for what happened to you. As a web developer working in the industry for about 4 years now, I can tell that charging even small fees for what you do is advised.
Even if you consider your client to be your friend (which I would not recommend from personal experience) there is little to no honor in people nowadays. Sadly.
Don't let this discourage you and keep going (; -
Best advice I ever got.
"Know your worth. If you don't charge clients what you're worth, they will think you're worthless."
Really sorry that happened to you. Good news is that you don't have to put up with him anymore.
Also, keep your proof that he used unlicensed content. Investors usually frown on that kind of thing because of the high risk of losing their money in a lawsuit. -
Doing stuff for free is fine if you can afford it. That is how a lot of the FOSS and almost all game mods and fan art are made after all. And you reacted fine too.
Most humans aren't assholes. But assholes exist and they target people they think they can abuse. With experience you get better at spotting them.
A damage mitigation strategy that always works, is to only do stuff for free you actually like to do and would have done anyways if you had the idea. That way, it doesn't matter whether the source of the idea is an asshole or not. For people of which you are actually pretty sure that they deserve it, you can still do more if you want.
Also, if possible, don't catch em fish but teach em how to fish, so they don't become dependent on you because human adults tend to start hating other humans they became dependent on. -
@emily really sorry this happened to you, my condolences.
If it helps, since you still have the source files, all artistic works are by default copyright owned by you as creator unless defined explicitly otherwise in an agreement.
You could sue them.... -
🤢 fucking idiots fucking everywhere... My gosh shit like this makes me angry... I really hope you get your way in the end.
PS. @sariel that was very good wording. I'll remember that -
@ScriptCoded it was my business analytics professor back in college.
He had a long career before teaching and tried to impress as much of his life experience on his students.
Another gem on the topic of gathering information, "you know what you think you know, but you will never know unless you can prove it." I doubt many students thought hard on that one, but it's such an important concept to understand. -
I see a lot of tips saying you gotta charge to set a bar for customers. I agree. But easier said than done when you're green and nervous. When I was in college I built some websites based off a cheap hourly rate but if bugs were found I felt like I had to fix them for free, couldn't dream of asking for money to correct a mistake I made.
What helped me was to co-work with people who were less neurotic and more relaxed than me.
A defining moment was when I built a site with one such friend, client found a horribly sloppy bug that was our fault, I was about to say "So sorry, we'll fix it ASAP for free really fast" thinking I'd probably have to pull an all nighter. But my friend said "Wow, that's a big problem you've got yourself into. What are you telling me for? Can't do anything unless you pay me. And it'll take a long time to fix." And the client happily paid. I was stunned.
hope this isnt a repeat. have a great weekend guys!!!!!
Reality
After creating a logo *for free* for a client who I thought was a friend, they started getting really ungrateful and demanded me to do things in a not very calm way ("DO THIS", "DO THIS RIGHT NOW") (yes, it was actually in caps). I kindly asked them to stop using the graphics while informing them that the license used didn't let me actually force them to remove it. After that, they started yelling about how "he'd have to redo all the graphics again". All he did was put the vector logo inside a raster circle and change the font. Yes, he really did convert vector graphics to raster and didn't use the originals at all. Not only this, but he also used *aliased* raster images.
He ended up using them anyway, informing me in a cheeky way after being kicked out of a group chat (which I wasn't even the moderator of). See the picture attached for how he did that, red is the client, orange is the moderator who banned him.
TL;DR: Don't do free stuff, regardless of how bad you think your skills are.
rant
client
graphic design
free work