Someone Else's Folder, Your Problem: A Field Guide to Taking Over a Half-Built Design Project

Every freelancer gets the email eventually. Warm tone, friendly brief, folder attached. Inside is a Canva export saved as a PDF, a Word document someone has titled 'brand guidelines', and a font file called BebasNeue-Regular that nobody can prove anyone paid for.

They call it their source file. You'd call it a crime scene.

Taking over a project someone else started is standard studio life, and it's often brilliant work — rescue jobs turn into long-term retainers more often than cold pitches do. The problem is that it goes wrong in a predictable way. You quote for design. You end up doing archaeology. Six weeks later you're rebuilding a logo in vector from a 72dpi JPEG and wondering where the day went.

The fix isn't to refuse these jobs. It's to run them in a different order: audit, quote, then design.

First, call the thing what it actually is

Clients aren't lying when they say they have the source file. They genuinely believe the thing their last designer emailed them is the working file, because it opened when they double-clicked it.

So early on, in writing, describe what you've received in plain terms. Something like: what I've been sent is a flattened PDF and a set of exported images. There's no editable artwork here. This does two jobs at once — it resets expectations, and it quietly builds the paper trail you'll want when the scope conversation arrives later.

Avoid the temptation to be diplomatic to the point of vagueness. 'I'll have a proper look and see what I can do' is how you end up absorbing fifteen hours of cleanup into a £900 quote.

The 60-minute intake audit

Book a paid or at least explicitly capped audit before you price anything. One hour, fixed fee, credited against the project if it goes ahead. Clients accept this surprisingly readily, and it filters out the ones who were hoping to get a full rebuild for free.

In that hour, work through a fixed list so you're not improvising:

• Open everything. Not the thumbnails — the files. Note which ones open, which ones throw up missing-link warnings, and which ones are password-protected.
• Check the real format. Rename the extension on a copy if you have to. A file called logo-final.pdf is often a PNG with delusions.
• Inventory the fonts. Identify each one and note whether it's a system font, an Adobe Fonts face, a Google Font, or something a previous designer installed locally. This is the single biggest hidden cost in the job.
• Audit the images. Note resolution, whether they're embedded or linked, and whether the stock licence is in the client's name or the previous designer's.
• Look for the colour system. Or the absence of one. Spot colours, hex codes, a Pantone reference someone wrote in an email three years ago.
• Count the deliverables that already exist and the ones that don't. Clients routinely believe they own things they never commissioned.

Write it up as a one-page findings note. Bullet points, no jargon, no blaming the previous designer. This document is the foundation of your quote, and it's the thing that stops the 'but it's basically done' argument in its tracks.

Where the traps actually hide

Fonts are the classic. A client who had a designer set their logo in a commercial typeface has, in most cases, licensed nothing. The licence sat with the studio or the individual. If you're reworking the artwork, you either need the client to buy the licence, or you need to propose a licensed alternative, or you need to redraw the wordmark as outlines and accept that it can never be edited as live text again. All three are legitimate. None of them are free, and none of them are your problem to eat.

Stock imagery runs a close second. Royalty-free licences are usually non-transferable, which means the client's old designer's account is the licence holder, not the client. If you can't find a receipt, don't build a campaign on it.

Then there's the flat-PDF problem. Rebuilding a logo from a low-resolution file is real, skilled work, and it is not the same task as designing a logo. Price it as redraw time, at your normal rate, listed separately. If the client baulks, that's useful information about how the rest of the project will go.

Finally, the folder structure itself. Or rather, the absence of one. If you're going to work in this account, in this drive, with these files, you need to be able to find things in three months. Rebuilding a file structure is billable work, and it's usually the first thing to get cut from a quote. Don't cut it — just show it as a line item so the client can see what they're choosing between.

Quoting cleanup separately from creative

Structure the quote in three visible blocks:

1. Audit and reconstruction — the archaeology. Fixed fee or capped hours.
2. Design and development — the actual job they think they're buying.
3. Handover and licensing — packaging files properly, confirming font and stock positions, and writing the note that explains what's what.

Three blocks, three prices. The client can drop block one by supplying proper files. That's a genuine choice rather than a threat, and it puts the responsibility where it belongs.

Add a simple assumption line: this quote assumes the artwork supplied is editable and complete. If reconstruction is required beyond the audit findings, I'll quote for it before starting.

That sentence has saved more studio relationships than any contract clause.

Setting the boundary before it becomes yours

Two practical rules. First, don't accept a project on the promise of files that are 'coming later'. Wait for them or price as if they don't exist. Second, put a time limit on the audit findings — something like fourteen days — after which the quote is reissued. Files change, drives get tidied, and a client's memory of what they own drifts.

And be honest about the one thing you can't audit: whether the client will accept that the old work needs replacing. If they're emotionally attached to a logo drawn by a cousin in 2011, no amount of clean process will save you.

Leave a better folder than you found

Whatever you inherit, hand over something a stranger could pick up. A readme file explaining what each item is, a fonts folder with licence receipts attached, layered files named by purpose rather than by date, and a note saying which fonts are licensed to whom. It takes an hour. It also means the next freelancer isn't writing this article about you.