Where do you draw the line on fixing customer artwork?

You spent forty minutes redrawing a logo last Tuesday. It arrived as a screenshot pulled off somebody's phone, at a resolution that would have printed as a smear. You fixed it because the alternative was a difficult conversation with a customer who has been ordering from you for six years. You billed nothing for it, and you will probably do the same thing again this week.

Almost every shop does this, and it is one of the most-argued topics on print forums. It is also one of the least-written-about, which is strange given how much money it quietly moves. The problem is not that shops are too generous. It is that most of them have never drawn a line, so every job becomes a fresh negotiation with themselves about whether this particular fix is small enough to absorb.

What is the ten-minute rule?

Ten minutes of art time is included with any order. Past that, it is billed at your art rate. That is the whole rule, and its power comes from being decided once rather than re-decided on every job.

Ten minutes is genuinely enough for the small things: resizing and repositioning, converting a colour mode, cleaning up a rough edge, setting up the print file properly. Those are legitimate parts of preparing a job and it would feel petty to bill for them separately. What ten minutes will not cover is redrawing a logo from a photograph, separating a full-colour image for screen, or rebuilding something from a compressed JPEG. That is precisely the point of choosing a number.

The specific figure matters far less than having one at all. Some shops give fifteen minutes, others give none and bill from the first minute. What changes the economics is that the decision has been made in advance, written down, and communicated. Nobody on your team then has to improvise it at nine in the morning with a customer on the phone.

What does each type of fix actually cost?

Before setting a rate, time these in your own shop for a week. Most owners are surprised, because art time is invisible in a way press time is not. Nobody watches the art station the way they watch a press sitting idle.

Five jobs a week needing a redraw is roughly $250 of unbilled labour. Across a year that is near a part-time salary, given away in fifteen-minute increments that never felt significant enough to argue about. It stays hidden because it never appears as a line on anything. It shows up only as a vague sense that the art station is always behind and that margins are thinner than they should be.

There is a second cost that is easier to miss. Art time that never gets recorded also never reaches your job cost model, so the jobs that consume the most design work look exactly as profitable as the ones that arrive print-ready. That distorts your pricing in the direction of the hardest work you do. Record art time against the job even when you decide not to bill it, purely so you can see the annual number.

How do you say it without losing the customer?

The framing matters more than the policy. Never present it as a complaint about their file, because that puts them on the defensive about something they usually do not understand and cannot fix. Present it as a choice they get to make, with the cost and the outcome both visible. Customers who feel informed rarely object; customers who feel judged usually do.

The third line does the most work, and it is the one shops most often skip. You are not refusing the job and you are not lecturing anyone about file formats. You are showing them the outcome and handing the decision back. In practice most customers either find the original file or approve the charge, because once they can see what the alternative looks like the decision makes itself.

Send the proof through the same channel that carries the rest of the order, not as a loose attachment in a reply. A proof that sits in an email thread is a proof nobody can find later, and chasing it is one of the quiet contributors to the status questions that eat an hour a day. Attach it to the job, timestamp the approval, and the conversation is settled permanently.

Can you enforce this before the order?

Yes, and it works considerably better than enforcing it afterwards. The difference is timing rather than policy. A customer told at the moment of upload experiences it as a system requirement; a customer told three days later experiences it as a shop making excuses for a delay.

Set rules at the point where artwork enters your process, and make them specific:

• Minimum resolution — reject anything below 150dpi at the intended print size
• File types — accept vector and high-resolution raster, refuse screenshots outright
• Colour count — flag any artwork exceeding the number of screens quoted
• Print area — reject art that will not fit the placement on the garment ordered

Each of those removes a category of problem before it becomes your problem. The colour count check pays for itself fastest, because a design that quietly needs a fourth screen is one of the more expensive surprises in screen printing and it is very easy to miss on a monitor. The resolution threshold is not universal either — what fails on a large screen print may be perfectly acceptable printed digitally at a smaller size, so set the rule against the process you will actually use.

If your platform cannot enforce any of this at upload, that is worth knowing before you renew it. It is one of the specific things to put in front of a vendor during an evaluation, alongside the other questions a demo will not answer on its own. Hand them a real 72dpi customer logo and watch what their designer does with it.

When should you break your own rule?

Deliberately, and not often. There are two cases where absorbing the art time is straightforwardly good business. The first is a genuinely large order where the art time is trivial against the value of the job. The second is a long-standing customer's first job of the year, where a small unbilled favour buys goodwill you will draw on later.

What matters is that you know you are doing it. A rule broken knowingly on a good-sized order is a commercial decision. A rule that gets broken every time somebody sounds slightly annoyed is not a rule at all, and your team will work that out within a fortnight. The rest of the artwork archive assumes you have drawn the line somewhere.