Advice needed!

I live in a small city, where there are at most 20 freelance designers. We're mostly friends, and supportive of each other, but competition can be fierce (and good/healthy, as we all work hard to have very strong personal styles, which helps).

However, I'm one of the older/more established in my scene and I continue to be financially undercut by crazy talented young designers who give away their working files, do a tonne of pro-bono work, and generally don't get payed their worth.

More and more often, I've been asked to give away all of my working files, to have the client develop a whole "brand" from a single poster design or they'll subcontract someone to "mine" the design and transfer it across platforms. I'm happy to stick up for myself, but often, I won't get a second callback if I do. It's a practice that's undoing a lot of good work that's gone into educating the local community to actually pay for design.

I've started asking beforehand if working files are required (and will adjust the quote accordingly) or how the work will be used, and it doesn't often help (sometimes it does though, and than, yay!)

I've also talked to some of the younger ones, who are totally receptive...i.e. there was a festival doing poster contests, and I spoke up publicly and suggested that the designers should be payed for their work, since bands were being payed for theirs (and the posters were being sold). I had a lot of the newbies thank me, since they hadn't looked at it in any way, other than getting "exposure" cuz the bands were well known.

So, my options, as I see them are: I just say fuck it, and charge the same as the (super good, but inexperienced with printing/production) newbies, or specialize like crazy, or try to educate clients on freelance etiquette, or just take a deep breath and let it all go?

Anyone else dealing with similar issues, or starting a design collective or group in a small city/community that helps address these problems, while still allowing for some healthy competition?

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted December 29, 2017 at 03:00AM by kizzlestick http://ift.tt/2E7vjlL