A Question

Hey friends,


Lately I've had a question in my mind, and I'm really hoping that some of you anonymous, anti-comment, page viewers (i know you're there, my stats say so!) can give me some feedback and opinions on the matter.


You probably know that I am in the design field of work, and more and more recently I've started doing work for my friends who are all approaching the beginning of their own professional lives. For the most part this work is unpaid, because 1. they're my friends 2. they're just as poor as I am 3. I'm bad at telling people who I've only spoken with on a casual, friend level, that the work I'm doing for them should cost money. I'm getting better with the last one, and to be completely honest, I enjoy design, so when they are a for real friend, I really don't mind doing the small jobs for free, but here is the "but". 


When you're doing work for free (or even not for free for the sake of discussion and conversation) how much creative license do you give yourself? In a lot of situations these pals of mine give me all I want, they so do what you do, and I do exactly that, but what about if one of them gives you a clear plan? And what if that plan doesn't really seem like the best one to you? 


I keep finding myself tempted to ditch the friend-clients initial vision to do my own rendition. When I start to wander off from their ideas and create plenty of justifications. I tell myself it's ok, because I'm the expert on this, and since they're my friends, they should/will respect my professional opinion, go with me on it. I sometimes even try to justify my changes with the fact that this is work I am not being paid for, so I am sort of allowed to do it my way.


I know all of this is probably bad practice for when I work with paying clients, but I can't help it. Does this happen to anyone else?


Today a similar topic came up with a friend, in regards to hair cuts, and how we don't let friends or family cut our hair, since they usually ignore requests, and decide what they think is best. It made me think more about myself and how I handle the situation. I guess maybe this is just the status quo for creative service fields. 


Thoughts? I would really appreciate to hear what others have to say, and how they handle these sort of things.


Lu


P.S. I really hope this doesn't sound like I don't want to help out friends, because that's just not the case, I just find myself in this same creative dilemma most of the time.