Taking Care of The Business End of Design, Part III: Contracts

Guest contributor Dagmar Jeffrey

Every designer should know how to protect their creations. I by no means wish to imply that every prospect you come across are self-serving, mind you. There are folks who still follow the age old traditions of honoring verbal agreements. However you're a professional now and looking out for one's business interests is what professionals do. And since we're in the business of selling our design services, documenting every agreement from concept to final product is paramount and frankly, common sense.

1. Don't blindly count on a prospect/client to honor a verbal agreement, particularly when things start going wrong or they start abusing your arrangement with countless revisions and other costly, time consuming "freebies." Moreover, a verbal agreement will rarely if ever hold up in court. Even if you're doing a casual favor for Aunt Madge's bingo partner's cousin, save yourself a colossal headache and get every verbal agreement in writing. If for any other reason, just think of it as perpetuating a good habit.

2. Outline everything. That includes the number of revision, concept and redesign allotments, time limits, kill fees (if the client terminates the project prematurely for whatever reason, you can still be compensated for the time you spent until that point), documentation of credit, ownership of concept materials and working files, as well as other required itemized details.

I make it a rule not to hand a client my working files (unless it's been strictly negotiated as with the transfer of a logo's usage rights) for several reasons. For one thing, it avoids the unpleasantness of finding out that they commissioned another designer to "tweak" your work, then use that as a basis to call it "theirs." If they need revisions in the future, you also have first dibs, since the work and files are still technically your property. Outline in the contract how you will be giving them their final files (normally a hi-res pdf with a hard copy, which can be opened in virtually any program) to avoid any surprises later on. In the case of a work for hire, the working files by definition are property of the client.

3. Even if your goal is to work for a company rather than yourself, you will need to be aware that instances might require you to protect your work in writing. There are situations, as with companies who request a "test" for a project or for a situation where it feels like a verbal agreement is being used to make an important business or financial decision, that one should require that stipulations be made in writing as well. It's ultimately about protecting your assets to keep others from cashing in on your work without due compensation, which for a designer includes their intangible skill in arriving at creative solutions using the project parameters.

There are plenty of excellent resources and books on writing contracts to be found. GAG and AIGA have plenty of well drawn out sample contracts on site and in the case of GAG, they also have them available through their Pricing and Ethical Guidelines Handbook and Tad Crawford and Eva Doman Bruck's, Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers, a recommended buy. Getting information from reputable sites like Creative Latitude, BoDo, the Business of Design Online, and any number of design forum's (see the bottom of Part II) business section is also an excellent place to get answers to any questions one might have regarding any professional situation.

Dagmar Jeffrey has accumulated over ten years of print advertising and graphic communication arts experience through independent design contracting and pre-press production, both through her business Archetype Design Studio and via well established enterprises. She is also a member of the Brainstorming Team at no!spec and is presently collaborating on other projects pertinent to the industry.

During her down time, you can normally find Dagmar actively participating and generally hobnobbing in some of the most well regarded design forums, as well as tending to her design and news blog, ARCHE-BLogGER, a visual exploration inside the Creative Mind.

Taking Care of The Business End of Design, Part II: The Perils of SPEC

Guest Contributor Dagmar Jeffrey

Another very dangerous pitfall that every designer, most especially entering professionals like graduates and self taught creatives need to avoid like the plague are businesses that utilize speculative (widely known as "spec") models. They're alluring to a young starter, however in reality they are unethical, undercutting and ultimately counter productive towards the "Business-designer."

For one, the entire purpose of earning a living in this profession is just that—you earn a living. One is a professional first, designer second. Spec models essentially require a designer to work on active design projects for only the possibility of compensation. They are often masked as contests, logo mills or "tests" (to prove one's skill) by prospective employers. Designers fall for this trap by the boatload for several reasons. Some are:

1. Exposure. Designers feel that it's well worth working for free if it means that their stuff is "out there" where it might lead to actual paying work. For the most part however, very, very few ever get exposure that leads to paying work nor proper compensation (if any at all) for what they've already done.

2. Clients. By participating in contest and logo mill sites, a Designer feels that they will somehow establish some form of client relationship that could lead to referrals and better paying work. Again, a myth. Whether they can actually afford to invest in something as important as the identity of their business is irrelevant, people who solicit these places are there for one thing—bargain basement design. Lets say that they do want to work again with the designer. They'll still expect what they had before—ridiculously inexpensive design. They don't understand that the true value of a creative lies in the intangible, conceptual work, not the final execution. As I like to say, design is two parts conceptual development and one part execution. However to them, they feel that logo design is so simple, anyone with a computer and the right software can do it—and why believe otherwise? Clients are rarely privy to the behind-the-scene hours spent researching, sketching concepts, rendering and revisions. All they ordinarily see are a set of finished looking concepts to choose from and the final design.

3. Fast money. It's a concept that doesn't logically exist in a logo or contest mill. It's basic mathematics—there is one prize and a huge mass of eager entrants, all willing to literally give away their time and talent for the mere hope of winning. As with any contest, there is obviously no guarantee of winning. Even if there is, the "prize" is so ridiculously low it's laughable. It almost certainly doesn't justify the labor involved in producing the final product.

Logo design can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) 2012 London Olympics logo cost nearly a cool million USD. The more humble creative can charge anywhere in the range of five to fifteen thousand USD. Why so pricey? Among other reasons, unlike an ad, a website, or a billboard, a logo is used over and over by the client, in a myriad of applications, from signs, business cards, stationery systems, invoices and unlimited promotional collateral for the duration of the business or until the logo has outlived it's usefulness.

Designers with an intuitive business sense include their price for the usage rights of the logo—think along the lines of "licensing fees." When a designer creates anything, by law it is automatically theirs, unless they sell or give away their ownership rights to it. So what does the savvy, business-minded mill and company do? For the designer to participate they first have to agree to give away the rights of their submission, even if they lose. The reality is that the only one who really wins in a spec situation is the spec business itself.

4. Training Grounds. One doesn't learn how to develop a proper, stable and realistic client-designer communication. They rarely if ever learn how to create informative client briefs, nor establish a healthy developmental creative process. How can they, they're too busy vying for the winning bid to foster a positive proactive relationship. It's just a poor professional training ground in nearly every sense of the word.

5. Absence of options. A business that requires as part of their recruitment process that a designer work on active projects to land a paying job is really getting free labor. Pretty obvious, isn't it? There is sometimes some form of testing to verify one's skill it's true, but not on active projects for actual clients. The simple fact is that this is not an acceptable or ethical process. Many designers in such a situation have been known to ask for a written agreement that their work will not be used without proper compensation first.

There are plenty of articles that a designer can turn to further their education. One is an article I wrote for Designorati titled, Combating The Stigma of the Overpriced Designer. Another "must bookmark" resource for every designer is the no!spec web site, which has all sorts of nifty tibits and downloads on the ills of speculative work. Or simply take a trip to any reputable design forum like HOWdesign...there are two now, About.com's GD forum, and the The GDF. Members will be more than happy to offer nuggets of wisdom for those in need.

Next Time: Part III

Dagmar Jeffrey has accumulated over ten years of print advertising and graphic communication arts experience through independent design contracting and pre-press production, both through her business Archetype Design Studio and via well established enterprises. She is also a member of the Brainstorming Team at no!spec and is presently collaborating on other projects pertinent to the industry.

During her down time, you can normally find Dagmar actively participating and generally hobnobbing in some of the most well regarded design forums, as well as tending to her design and news blog, ARCHE-BLogGER, a visual exploration inside the Creative Mind.

"speck" illustration by Dagmar Jeffrey.
No!Spec logo design by Piers Le Sueur.

Taking Care of The Business End of Design, Part I: Show Me the Money...please?

Guest Contributor: Dagmar Jeffrey

Like many folks, I learned my trade from attending a university with a solid design program. One that had award winning industry professionals as part of their administrative staff. To boot, I graduated cum laude, believing that it would give me an additional leg up over the competition when I entered the job hunting market. The purpose of investing a great deal of time, all nighters and finances in my design education was to prepare me for the wonderful, lucrative world of professional design.

Well, I was sure in for a jolt of reality. Although my education did instill a strong creative foundation, what it didn't require was for me to learn the business end of design. It never occurred to me that I would need to learn how to market myself, or to avoid business models that worked on spec. It didn't teach me how to legally protect myself and my creations. The world of business and the world of academia were two completely different motivated beasts. In a way, one can say that because of the distinctions, I ended up feeling as though I were tossed to the corporate wolves with a juicy flank steak tied to my back.

Whether one wants to work for a company or break into the business as an entrepreneur, it's every designer's duty to learn how to market their services. It's not just about having a stellar looking portfolio. It's about presentation, researching the prospective employer's needs and learning how to negotiate for a competitive salary. For example, whenever the sordid topic of coin came up during an interview, more often than not I was asked how much I was looking to make. Savvy move that, putting the pressure on a professional novice. They knew that I would probably end up doing one of three things.

1. Lowball myself. I figured that so long as I got the job, my pay would eventually increase to a more commensurate range. As I painfully learned, a fair share of good businesses practiced employing a revolving door of cheap, inexperienced labor. One of their favorite "parting" shots with designers who finally wised up to this inequity was giving the "you can always be replaced" line. Regardless whether the replacement is sufficiently skilled to do the job, they usually ended up being right.

If it's a small or unknown business, walking away may be the best choice, rather than risk a dead end job scenario. But if it's a desired position in a very good company, one has to sit down and consider whether or not the return will justify the means. For example, let's say the company is a big firm that promises a raise a few months down the line (after a formal review or probation period). Is the risk of not getting what they promise after the time passes worthwhile? Some would argue yes, because if the promise wasn't met for whatever the reason, you can always look for another job, with the prestige of the firm in your resume as leverage for a better paying starting salary elsewhere. The trick here however, is to read the writing on the wall and know when you're not really going anywhere, or making what you should.

2. Put the ball back in their court and let them establish the salary. Makes sense, however the catch here is that whatever figure they toss, even if it's less than what is expected, it's almost immediately accepted. Hey, we were taught to design, not negotiate.

3. Offer a competitive rate. Sounds great eh, to actually say, "Your position's requirements should be worth *this*," expecting the interviewer to nod approvingly. Unfortunately, more often than not, you'll never hear from the prospective employer again, which makes the job hunter feel as though they made a huge miscalculation. The real mistake was lacking the proper salesmanship to engage in negotiations with a counteroffer, nor convince them why making an investment in your talent would ultimately benefit them. Taking a page from professional salesmen and agents, they learned how to turn a tentative "no" into a solid "yes." Considering we have no choice but to sell our own services, it's a vital skill that's worth developing.

I recommend picking up The Savvy Designer's Guide to Success, Ideas and Tactics for a Killer Career, by Jeff Fisher. It offers many useful tidbits and ideas, plus real accounts from successful Designers on their self marketing adventures and tactics. Another book worth perusing is The Business Side of Creativity: The Complete Guide for Running a Graphic Design of Communications Business, by Cameron S. Foote. The site, Creatively Self Employed also offers some other good reading suggestions.

Next Time: Part II

Dagmar Jeffrey has accumulated over ten years of print advertising and graphic communication arts experience through independent design contracting and pre-press production, both through her business Archetype Design Studio and via well established enterprises. She is also a member of the Brainstorming Team at no!spec and is presently collaborating on other projects pertinent to the industry.

During her down time, you can normally find Dagmar actively participating and generally hobnobbing in some of the most well regarded design forums, as well as tending to her design and news blog, ARCHE-BLogGER, a visual exploration inside the Creative Mind.

"For Sale" image source: grow-a-brain