3 Things You Don’t Want to Leave Off Your Contract

3 Things You Don’t Want to Leave Off Your Contract

written by Charlie Pabst

We’re a litigious society. Some people get sued more than I eat breakfast. The psychiatric profession industry alone currently has more than 28,000 active suits against it. So this post is not without purpose, and the main point is that you need a contract.

Contracts are essential. They don’t have to be big or confusing or full of legal jargon or anything like that. But they do have to be agreed upon and they have to define the responsibilities of both parties. And they should be signed by both parties.

Now, there are cut/paste contracts floating around online. They’re free to use but I would recommend writing your own or getting a lawyer to prepare a standard one for you.

Regardless, contract writers and lawyers, not being designers, aren’t always aware of how the design process can wreak havoc on one’s time and money. This post is about three little elements that every design-based contract should have that could save you and your clients a lot of headaches.

But first, my usual disclaimer:

(Disclaimer: This was written by me and I’m not a lawyer. This post is for educational/entertainment purposes only and should not be copy/pasted or written into any contract, document, birth certificate, driver’s license or counterfeit money of any type. Unless it’s Canadian.)

(Disclaimer #2: Just kidding about the Canadian thing.)

Specify Rules on Revisions

Revisions can be a nightmare. Just a tweak here and tweak there, over and over, can kill days or even weeks of time.

I’ve seen contracts of my peers that said “will do infinite revisions.” Big no no. Some folks I know use that to win bidding for a project, like on Elance.com. But unless you’re really going to do infinite revisions, I recommend never ever saying this ever. Not ever. If you say it, you’ll be responsible for it and you may wish a piano would fall on you from a high-rise window.

Say this instead:

“Designer will be responsible for X number of revisions.” Or, “Will do unlimited revisions within X amount of days.”

That last one is a good way to go. It specifies how long you’ll be liable for revisions, so automatically puts the client under pressure to keep the ball rolling.

We Need to Make a Change

You’ll want to cover yourself, your funding and the project delivery timeline against major revisions to the project.

It’s not that a major change is bad, far from it. At the very least it means the client is actively engaged in the project. There are far worse things.

One of them is having a major change thrown at you that takes weeks to fix. And if you don’t specify what happens upon a major change, you may end up working weeks without pay as the delivery schedule and rates were already “agreed upon.”

Hey, What is a “Major” Change?

It’s up to you how you define this but define it you should. This goes for any time you use a word like “major” or “minor” or “small” in a contract. They’re completely arbitrary words and are subject to caprice and opinion. Opinion is the last thing upon which you should build a contract.

To me a major change is one which inherently affects other elements and/or greater than 50% of the appearance of a project. It’s the Snowball Effect that you want to guard against, like where a “minor change” breaks the navigation of a entire site or renders a design entirely obsolete.

If you designed the Nike swoosh, for example, and their design team said, “We want you to make one small change. We’re not really happy with the swoosh element.” That’s not a minor change. That’s the entire logo.

(Real disclaimer: Nothing in this post is or should be interpreted as legal advice. Consult a lawyer immediately if not sooner.)