“Now that’s brand worthy!”
As mentioned to a few people at linux.conf.au. This is what id like to some day spend 100% of my time on.
For a few projects i’ve been lucky enough to dip into the wonderful repositories at openclipart.org and style assets to suit my clients brand. The time / cost savings keep them interested and the fact that I slightly modify non-specic illustrations to outside of their brand keep them happy too.
So before doing a massive amount of corporate stock artwork for a client , try convincing them to let you release their assets under another style and a free license to boot. As a reward you say you’ll reduce redundant production time signifigantly by pulling stock from openclipart or your own personal assets.
Check out that diagram. (pictures dont lie) Their rightful property is their identity. There is no shame in helping someone strengthen and protect that identity.
Other people’s logos and trademarks are of no use to the community. Multi-purpose templates, illustrations and other assets are what we should be looking to keep. Wouldn’t it suck if you had to draw a briefcase and do a 3 column layout template for every client you worked for before doing anything new? Abstract the brand from the design enough and fight for your templates back on the grounds that your clients have already leveraged benefits from public assets. You’d be suprised how much ground a little rational argument like this can give, I havent been turned down once.
So long as you can reasonably separate their brand from your assets its worth fighting to have them opened up!
I mean, for me, doing things like SVG clipart and Iconsets driven by universal stylesheets would be fantastic because they make this separation even easier when you consolidate it down to a set of palette, stoke, specularity and shading manipulators. RSVG and Inkscape have yet to support external stylesheets but the day they do: i’ll dance on the nearest desk waving a bezier pen like it was a victory sword.
I hope that rant made sense but i thought id blog it anyway