Preliminary Design Fees

[paramnesia]

According to the personal experiences of people here, what is more common practice: to incorporate the time and effort it takes to do preliminary designs -- character sketches and such -- for a job into the finished page rate or to charge the client for those separately, perhaps as a per character fee rather than per page?

[J Wilson]

According to the personal experiences of people here, what is more common practice: to incorporate the time and effort it takes to do preliminary designs -- character sketches and such -- for a job into the finished page rate or to charge the client for those separately, perhaps as a per character fee rather than per page?

For what? For a cover or other single illustration you'd pretty much have to just include it in the completed project fee. For another kind of project I suppose the character designs might have value beyond their immediate application, and I could see charging them separately.

I guess my rule of thumb on this would be: is it probable another artist will pick up these designs down the road to work from? If so, I'd say the designs themselves should be a separate sale (and negotiation). If the character designs will be used pretty much just for the work you are doing, then I'd suggest just rolling it into one fee.

This is my gut feeling on the topic, but it's probably different from application to application.