If you’re any kind of creative professional, you have two levels of obligation to your clients. One of those levels is your legal obligation, which should be laid out in some kind of written contract or agreement. The second level is an ethical obligation. If your client is savvy, your legal obligation and your ethical obligation should coincide. In most situations, though, this isn’t the case, opening up the opportunity for duplicitous designers to take advantage of less experienced clients.

Last week, I spent some time working on a project with an illustrator. In poking around the backend of the illustrator’s website, I noticed that her online portfolio had been constructed around a fairly generic WordPress theme sold online for $20. A quick glance at the stats over at the theme store revealed over three thousand bloggers had purchased this theme for use. This illustrator prides herself on her attention to detail, so it surprised me that she would feel comfortable using such a common, almost entirely unmodified template.

I brought the matter up with the illustrator. She paid a web designer $1300 to create her online portfolio, operating under the implied understanding that he would provide her with an original design upon which she could base her brand. Legally, however, this understanding was not made clear. The web designer used the illustrator’s naivety to onsell the license to a cheap WordPress theme for well over fifty times the license’s cost. Legally, the designer has purchased the right to sell the design to his client. Ethically, however, the client is not expecting to be resold the license to use somebody else’s design. There’s a disconnect between what is legally allowable, and what is ethically right.

A broad equivalent might be a photographer purchasing a series of stock photographs, presenting those photographs to the editor of a magazine as her own work, and pocketing the difference. Or a student purchasing a piece of writing from an online essay mill and turning that work in to his professor.

I wonder how often these kinds of shenanigans takes place. Unfortunately, the legal burden falls on the client to make their needs as explicit as possible.

The ethical burden, however, falls squarely on the creative professional. If you consider yourself a true craftsperson, and if you value doing damn good work, you should be as open and honest as possible with your client. You should be able to explain your work clearly, without reference to meaningless acronyms or technical language, and you should set your prices fairly, instead of setting rates based on how much you think you can squeeze for the very least possible effort.

If you shirk your ethical obligation and attempt to deceive your client in search of a quick buck, you’re an embarrassment to everybody out there for whom the work is more than merely the means to an end. This isn’t about feeling guilty. It’s about taking pride in who you are and what you do.

Whenever I’m face-to-face with something fantastic (whether that be a wonderfully-produced novel or magazine, website or  product), I find that a certain part of me gets a bit anxious. I’m aware that the book/site/thing before me is better than anything I could have produced myself. As a creative type, I’m liable to get a bit jealous.

Over time, though, I’ve learned to see things differently. It’s the gap between my work and the fantastic work I see that excites me. That gap means there’s a wealth of knowledge and experience out there, lying in wait. That gap means I’m never bored.

Curiously, as I get better at what I do, I don’t find that gap narrowing. Instead, the more I learn, the more I recognise there is to learn.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling proud of your work, but if you believe your work is perfect, I pity you. It means you’ve lost the ability to recognise the existence of the treasury of understanding that sits just outside your grasp.

Stay hungry, stay foolish… and keep grasping.

Dear Adelaide Fringe,

Every year, you run a poster design competition to determine the visual branding of the next year’s festival. I understand why you might think this is a great idea: it’s inclusive, puts “professional designers” on the same level as the amateurs, is a bit of fun, and gets people chatting.

From another standpoint, though, it’s Very Wrong Indeed. In sourcing specifically-produced work from a range of designers (the “entrants”) and only paying one of those designers (the “winner”), the end result is that you’ve dramatically underpaid for all the work you’ve received. Even if you pay the winner handsomely, consider this: if you receive a hundred entries and select pick one, you’re only paying 1% of what you should have. If every organisation or business were to follow your lead, the median salary across the design profession would shoot down. That sucks, no?

“Whoa, now!” I hear you say. “That’s a bit rich! We’ve made the rules clear! People know what they’re getting into!” That’s true, but it’s also true that you’ve set a precedent for other organisations and businesses to follow in sourcing design work. You’re a leader here, and instead of approaching the designer as a fellow professional, you’re promoting a model in which the client has all the power and the designer has none.

Would you consider it acceptable for any other business to seek out a redesign this way? If not, ask yourself what makes your organisation the exception to the rule – and recognise that almost every business believe themselves the exception (that’s the whole problem).

Also keep in mind that, contrary to supporting emerging talent, you’re actually suggesting to the amateur designer that spec work is acceptable practice, and that it’s usual for designers to work on projects for which they receive no compensation. Emerging designers need to understand that spec work is bad practice, or risk undervaluing their work.

So, what’s to be done, then? I’d suggest a better way to go about sourcing a fantastic poster design would be to ask designers – professional or amateur – to shoot through samples from their portfolio. If one of those designers stands out, you work with them to determine the kind of poster design you’d like. For unsuccessful applicants, very little time or energy is lost. For the successful applicant, you provide valuable advice and experience, assisting them in creating the kind of poster that fits the festival. You get a better poster. You don’t piss anybody off. Everybody wins.

Miriam Zolin on readers’ ideas of where the ‘sweet spot’ in ebook pricing might lie:

[I]f you price your eBooks by offering a $30% discount on the print edition, you’re probably just making the eBook a little bit closer to what people really think they should be paying for a paperback, i.e. too expensive for an eBook! With everybody reading more as they shift to eBooks, maybe we need to price our eBooks to attract readers and maybe our bottom lines will thank us.

In other words, it’s the App Store Principle: with distribution and production costs of your digital product at zero, and with a potentially global audience, you drop the price of your product and gun for quantity.

Update: Over at First Monday (my new favourite scholarly journal), Jana Bradley and her team note that “the developing price differential between self–published ebooks, most under US$4.99 and the increase in some mainstream publishers’ ebook prices as high as US$17.99 raises interesting questions about where the increase in ebook sales is really coming from.” Which raises another interesting question: are general readers willing to settle for lower-quality writing if the price is right?

Slot this one in the file marked “Digital Magazines Done Right”.