Coping With Clients Who Use Your Concept Design — Without Paying

A client has taken your concept design and hired someone else to execute it for less money. The client is reaping the benefits of your talent and skill, but you’re still eating generic mac n’ cheese. What recourse do you have?

Imagine (or remember) this common freelance design scenario: In the process of bidding on a project the prospective client asks you to provide a concept or visual representation of the ideas you propose. The concept will be part of your proposal to the client, and you will only receive compensation for the design if you win the contract. This is called “designing on spec,” and it’s a very, very bad idea. Even knowing how risky and foolish it is to design on spec (speculation), you need this contract, and you don’t believe you can convince the client to consider your proposal without a spec design. Being sick of eating store-brand mac n’ cheese for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you design the project and hand over proofs.

A week (or month) later, you haven’t heard back from the client. Is the contract yours? Was the project delayed or killed? Did the client go out of business? Longing to buy real Kraft Mac n’ Cheese (it’s the cheesiest!™), you place a quick call to the client. She seems genuinely surprised to hear from you. “Oh,” she says. “We went with a different vendor with a more reasonable rate.” Damn! “One of our interns can do it for free, actually.” The hackles on the back of your neck stand up, but you’re not sure why. Mustering all your meager negotiation skills, you try to convince the client that, while the intern may seem like the perfect choice, a project of this nature really needs the hand of a professional with years of training and proven skills. Of course, your argument fails; the type of client who chooses free professional services has no concept of the value of education, experience, or her own company’s brand. Defeated by the unassailable fortress of deliberate ignorance, you thank the client and hang up.

A month later, as you’re trolling the Internet looking for any excuse to not think about the fact that you’ve exhausted all 1,001 ways to spice up bottom-shelf macaroni and cheese, you decide to check out the lost client’s Website. Let’s see, you say to the cat. Just how well that intern did.

When your heart starts pumping again, when air has once more flooded your lungs, you forcefully expel that air as a staccato of shouted expletives that rattle the windows and shatter the neighbor kids’ innocence. There, before your very eyes, is your design. But for a few hideous alterations here and there, the lost client’s new Website (or brochure, package, or whatever) is the spec design you had delivered with your proposal!

Ever found yourself in this scenario? If not, and if you design on spec, rest assured: You will.

But let’s not recriminate the desperate acts of hungry freelancers. While an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, if you do find yourself mired in this situation, you need to have your pound of cure ready to drop onto the scale.

Let’s break this all too common scenario down into phases to first understand the mistakes made, how to prevent them, and then possible cures if it’s too late for prevention.

Phase I: The Proposal

MISTAKE: Designing on spec is the term for creating and delivering a design before officially being hired. Re-read the previous sentence (I’ll wait right here). Do you understand what that means? Designing on spec is you performing a valuable, professional service gratis–free–with no promise of compensation.

Do you think an attorney would appear in court on your behalf without some form of remuneration? Of course not. Lawyers work for clients to whom they aren’t related only in exchange for compensation of one form or another. This may take the form of hourly billings with or without a retainer, a percentage of any monetary award resulting from successful representation, or pro bono representation. While pro bono representation costs the client nothing, it isn’t altruism on the part of the attorney; every member of the bar is required to volunteer a certain number hours of pro bono work per year in order to remain a member of the bar–and thus, remain eligible to practice law. You will never find an attorney who will prepare a contract or appear in court for you on spec, hoping you will like the results enough to later elect to pay him.

Similarly, you’ll never locate a (sane) accountant to do your taxes, a psychologist to help you cope with the death of your pet turtle when you were eight, or physician to treat that strange rash, on spec. These are all educated, skilled professionals who expect to be compensated for the benefits you derive from the investments they made in their educations and skills. As a creative pro, you invested in your own education and skills; maybe you have a degree, maybe you learned on the job, either way, you invested time and money into learning your craft, and you invested hard currency in the tools of your trade (Creative Suite is a great deal, but it’s still $1,200). That’s your investment, like an accountant’s degree, certification, and very expensive software. Design is a profession, and, like any profession, you must be compensated for the benefits someone gains from the use of your talent, skill, and training.

When you design on spec, you are risking the all too easy forfeiture of any value inherent in your work and the talent, skills, and education that contributed to the work. Moreover, you’re teaching clients that your work–all design work–has no value.

The typical client serviced by freelancers believes that the value of a design is tied up in the way software is used. Think about that for a moment. Is the worth of carpentry determined by the swing of a hammer? Are Michelangelo’s tempera paintings more valuable than his sculptures because of their medium? More to the point, is a forger’s painting of equal value to the original masterpiece because the forger can mix the right pigments and duplicate the brushstrokes?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, please stop reading now. In fact, please go directly to GetAFreelancer.com and don’t return to Designorati–ever. Designorati is for professional creatives, and anyone who would answer yes to any of the previous questions is, emphatically, not a professional creative.

The value of graphic, Web, and other forms of design is not inherent in the use of Illustrator, DreamWeaver, or any other tool. You, are the value of your designs, your talent and skills. Design–visual communication–is not a product; it’s a service. And it isn’t the service of delivering paper or pixels. Design is the service of solving problems. Creative pros solve communication problems. We solve the problem of effectively communicating a message visually to an audience. I could link to a handful of tutorials that explain ways to create flaming text in Photoshop, but not one that will tell you when to use flaming text in a design. That particular question is the chasm that separates designers from hobbyists with Photoshop. I’ve known professional creatives who can’t use Photoshop to save their lives, but whose work is employed to communicate the messages of the world’s top brands. By the same token, I’ve met plenty of non-designer’s whose Photoshop skills put many a creative pro to shame. Knowing the steps to create a particular effect doesn’t equate to knowing why or when to use that effect in the course of communicating a message. I’m quite skilled with a sewing machine and pattern, but that doesn’t grant me the talent, skill, or right to call myself a fashion designer.

How you solve a communication problem is the real value of your design work. When you design on spec, you’ve already done the job for which you would have been hired. Thus you risk both the opportunistic client and the ignorant asking themselves: “I’ve already got all the free milk I needed, why should I buy the cow?”

PREVENTION: Simple: Don’t design on spec. Shyuh! Right, man! I’ll never get any work then! Of course you’ll get work. You just need to make Brand You strong enough that prospects won’t feel the need for spec designs from you.

Make the proposal stand on its own without a spec design that gives away for free everything you bring to the contract. Learn about proposals, how to write them effectively, and how to use them to promote the skills and experience you offer.

Build up your portfolio. Get a diversity of recent and show-worthy projects into your portfolio. The absolute strongest case you can make for refusing to design on spec–in terms the client can understand–is that your portfolio already displays your capabilities. Point out previous work similar to what the client wants. You could even include print-outs of such similar work in the proposal package.

How do you build up your portfolio? Well, that’s a subject for another (several) articles, but here are a few suggestions:

• Donate your services to legitimate charitable groups;
• Let your friends and family know you’re looking for freelance work and will take on reasonable friend-of-a-friend work for a discount (be careful not to allow this to become your main source of business), and;
• If absolutely necessary, fake it with makeovers of existing ads, Websites, brochures, or whatnot. If you go with the latter, be extremely careful: You will be using someone else’s trademark- and/or copyright-protected work. Therefore, you may only show it in your portfolio in such a way that clearly indicates that it is not official work; you cannot sell any of that work or use it for any gain beyond showing your portfolio to prospective clients. And, for Pete’s sake, don’t deceive anyone, through action or inaction, into thinking you were hired by the brand owner to do that work!

CURE: Ok. So you’ve written a winning proposal and tried to convince the client your portfolio should stand on its own without the need for a spec design. The prospective client isn’t convinced. What now?