I have been in the graphic design industry since 1981 working in London, Los Angeles & Spain. My career started in the traditional way on a drawing board, using Rotoring Pens, Magic Markers, Pantone Pens & Letraset working as a Designer/Visualiser/Artworker. My design career has taken me through the music, toy, t-shirt, packaging & print industry. I am now a freelance graphic designer (British) based in Spain with many clients worldwide ...now using Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign on a Mac.
Depends on what you mean by bad! If a client contacts me that I do not know I always do a Google search on them to get a rough idea on their background. I usually can work out by what I read to what sort of client they are going to be and deal with them accordingly from the beginning. If I know their history of paying on time is bad I make sure I get more than 50% and do not give actual artwork til final payment is made. I am always polite with all clients even the bad ones. If I struggle getting a decent brief from them I send them a list of questions to answer which usually does the job. If a client starts to make many, many changes on a job already quoted for I have to tell them that I need to charge extra per hour (this is always pointed out before I start the job anyway). This usually makes them get the job approved quicker. I have a regular client that I know will knock down the price I give every single time ...and it is always the same amount he wants dropping. So, unknown to him, I always add that amount to the quote I give him and when he asks for the discount it ends up being the price I was going to charge anyway ...lol.
UPDATE...I have now written a guide to becoming a graphic designer. It is available as Kindle or in print ...check it out here... AMAZON LINK . Well ...I have learnt my lesson over the years ...never work for free or on a promise as it never ever works out in your favour. Ask yourself these questions:Do you know these people well?Do they have a success record with other projects making money?If they are investing money into making these cards, why are they not investing in your time and design work?At the end of the day, if it is very little work for you then you will be investing very little time into this project ...so if the equity % is good then go for it.If there is loads of work involved which eats into your time of other paying jobs and the equity % is poor then do the maths and you will probably say no.
Ask them about how much work is involved and how they plan to market these cards and then honestly value the potential of these cards doing well.
If you can see that it will lead to nothing then give a quote for your work ...or offer a discount for a small equity % ...if they can afford to print the cards and market them then they can afford to pay a designer.... if they can't then they have no money and are grasping at straws.
At the end of the day, do not under sell yourself ...good luck
UPDATE...I have now written a guide to becoming a graphic designer. It is available as Kindle or in print ...check it out here... AMAZON LINK . Well it really depends what format the original file is in. SVG is a vector format so I use Adobe Illustrator to do this ...but that is converting a vector file to SVG. Not sure if you can convert non vector files direct to SVG without a process in between to make it into a vector first. Not all formats work well in vector. I suggest doing a Google search on free SVG conversions as I am sure there are plenty of free websites that will do this I guess. Sorry I cannot be of more help. If I knew what format your original file is I might be able to help more.
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