Why would a freelancer need to follow an industry standard? Do you have to share project sources with clients in proprietary formats rather than just the final output formats?
The entire reason why standards exist, that’s why. Generally when you make something for a client they want to be able to hand it to anyone else in the industry to be able to also work on it.
A freelancer who doesn’t use industry standard stuff generally isn’t going to be freelancing for very long.
I see. Surely that means that the source files have to be structured in a certain way then. If a design for a piece of print media was flattened to a single rasterised layer, or a video project had all the effects baked into the clips, a freelancer could deliver in the right format, but that file would be much less useful than if every operation was preserved non-destructively. I would think some artists wouldn’t want to just give away how they achieve certain effects.
I don’t know if that’s much of a thing in creative fields, or if there are conventions on things like keeping text as text, not editing it as vectors or pixels.
It’s more about ingesting their house design guide in proprietary formats. But you will also be contractually obliged to deliver back working files along with the final deliverables, and they will specify formats and versions.
It doesn’t vary by client much, there’s a baseline of expectations that what you deliver can be further worked on by anyone using the software that 95% of the industry is using.
Why would a freelancer need to follow an industry standard? Do you have to share project sources with clients in proprietary formats rather than just the final output formats?
The entire reason why standards exist, that’s why. Generally when you make something for a client they want to be able to hand it to anyone else in the industry to be able to also work on it.
A freelancer who doesn’t use industry standard stuff generally isn’t going to be freelancing for very long.
I see. Surely that means that the source files have to be structured in a certain way then. If a design for a piece of print media was flattened to a single rasterised layer, or a video project had all the effects baked into the clips, a freelancer could deliver in the right format, but that file would be much less useful than if every operation was preserved non-destructively. I would think some artists wouldn’t want to just give away how they achieve certain effects.
I don’t know if that’s much of a thing in creative fields, or if there are conventions on things like keeping text as text, not editing it as vectors or pixels.
It’s more about ingesting their house design guide in proprietary formats. But you will also be contractually obliged to deliver back working files along with the final deliverables, and they will specify formats and versions.
Ah, I see. I guess that varies by client but you wouldn’t want to limit the work you take like that. That’s a difficult situation to change.
It doesn’t vary by client much, there’s a baseline of expectations that what you deliver can be further worked on by anyone using the software that 95% of the industry is using.