Lets be hypothetical...
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- kalkal
Lets say you hoarded thousands of commercial fonts. You didn't make any money from them. But then one faithful day, someone comes along with paid work and you have all these wonderful fonts to work with. You pick one and put that into a concept to show the client. The client doesn't like it so you switch to an alternative which the client does like. You put the costing of this typeface into the total cost and buy the font when its actually being used commercially. How ethically wrong is this?
(And i really havn't done it! Though I have contemplated it... @_@)
- kalkal0
Forgot to add... you only ever paid for the font that gave you any kind of profit...
- killerqueen0
It's actually a fairly common accounting practice to subtract the expense (different than cost, mind you) from your Income when, and only when, it actually generates that revenue for you. It's the matching principle.
- killerqueen0
How ethical is it? Up to you really. It's good enough for GAAP standards, which I'm sure will bring howls from some. But it makes sense....you pay for something only when it generates revenue for you. This is a very foreign concept to designers who have never watched their work actually generate profit outside their invoices, but take retailers.....they'll buy all their inventories on account (they don't pay for their inventories) and they only pay back suppliers after those inventories have been sold. At that point, like i mentioned earlier, they're recorded as an expense against Net Income.
- killerqueen0
This is not legal, because retailers do business this way based upon either a shitload of goodwill or solid contracts in place to ensure payment at some point or another.
However, it *does* make some sort of sense. I'm not going to disagree with the ethics of it.
- instrmntl0
i'd say if they requested a specific font, then you should charge them, guilt free. if you just went back and picked whatevs, then that is gray territory. i'd only charge if they wanted a specific font.
- well if they request it, its a solid buy. should be put into the contract also. under extra fees.akrokdesign
- i_monk0
It's ethical. If you didn't already have the font you could have picked it anyway, in which case you would have paid for it (yes) because it's a paying client, and charged him for it as part of the development cost.
- kalkal0
I just think it just makes more sense.. typographers make their fonts freely availible and people only pay money once they're used in a project and actually becoming profitable. Then they can be used again because you own them. Plus, the chance of them being used in the first place is probably much higher because if you have more fonts to chose from, theres more oppertunity to experiment with typefaces that you might otherwise not thought about...
- menos0
yeah but then there would be, and are, so many people that in the end dont buy the typeface but still use it for a project and the typographer wont be able to feed his/her typographic kiddies....or dog...or cat... you get the point.
- kalkal0
Yea, but they are the people that arn't paying for it now, and never will. While the people that already pay for them, will continue paying for them...