Obviously when it comes to in-house design, the company you are working for owns everything you are making. This is about a debate in the freelance/hired agency world on whether or not clients are entitled to editable source files when it isn’t stated in the contract.

I don’t think they are, and most designers agree; But this is hard for some clients to understand so I wanted to talk about why they may feel entitled to this file, and how you can explain your position.

So what are you paying for when you hire a designer? You are paying for the work in the scope outlined in the contract. The work is the final file sent over, not the source file they used to create it. If this is a template, that exception would have been made from the jump and included in the scope. Even in that case, the design itself should be untouchable and only pictures and text would be editable. Once the design is tampered with, the work that was paid for has been reduced in quality because it is no longer the final work of a professional, but rather the work of a professional that was messed with in some way.

And so why would a client want to mess up professional work? Best case scenario, it could be an innocent small typo fix that they don’t want to have to pay to edit. Worst case scenario, they are on a power trip where they want to have a hand in everything, whether or not they are capable. It could be something in the middle where they feel their vision was not clearly communicated, and would like to hand the work over to a different designer.

If you feel this is a violation of your client/designer relationship, which this kind of request will instinctively make you feel, take a step back and try not to respond emotionally. Instead refer to your contract and explain how the deliverables outlined did not include templates. You can copy one of the following reasons to your explanation, I’ve used a poster as an example.

• Why we won’t do it: Our promise is to deliver professional work that is created by someone who understands design and communication. That lens is based on X years of training and X years of work, and tampering with that will reduce the quality and usability of your final poster. Because of this, we are not comfortable with sharing the files that will enable you to do so.
• Why we’ll do it at an extra cost to you: What you are asking for is a template, not the poster that was stated in our contract. Templates cost $X more because we would be sharing our intellectual property with the option to use it as building blocks to create different versions of this poster. This would mean you are getting unlimited variations of the poster, instead of the 1 poster stated in our contract. If you would like a template version of the poster, please let us know what program you prefer it in, so that we can provide you with a quote and re-work our contract to include that in the scope.

At the end of the day, you should make the call based on your unique circumstances. Sometimes holding on the the source file does more harm than good, sometimes the client or the designer they want to hand it to actually do have enough design experience to make the tweaks they want. In that case, let the design go and make it clear that it is no longer your work and you don’t want it under your name.

Whatever you are comfortable with, outline it in all your contracts from now on, so you don’t get pulled into this awkward conversation again.