1. Protect Yourself

I enter into every working relationship with a client expecting the best but prepared for the worst. Remember that, even though you are a freelance self-employed designer, you also need to protect yourself, your company and/or your brand. Without a signed document by both parties, you do not have any physical evidence of what was agreed upon. And, in the unfortunate likelihood that you may need to take legal action against a client, the first thing an attorney will ask you for is a copy of your agreement. Without one, you will be mired in the land of legal “hearsay” and none of it will be admissible in a court of law.

2. Establish Expectations

The client has accepted your proposal for their project. Great! Now you need to detail everything each of you will be providing, in a concisely detailed manner. This immediately establishes transparency in your relationship and eliminates any confusion during the work process.

3. Establish a Time Line of Events

In an interesting article titled, Create a watertight Web site design contract, David M. Adler & Associates state:

After the scope of the project is defined and mutually understood, parties need to address the schedule. This schedule should set forth development milestones, testing and acceptance periods, and payment time lines.

Let’s face it. Not every freelance graphic designer has been reliable and you will, at some point, encounter a client who has had a less than stellar relationship in the past. This is especially true when it comes to time lines. Outline a series of events for your client and give them some peace of mind that the both of you are now legally bound by these terms. Our agreement contains conditional punitive clauses, for both parties, if the terms of the time line are broken.

4. Establish a Payment Schedule

Some may argue that this should be the number one reason for working with a service agreement. Though we put ourselves through this because we enjoy it, this is our livelihood. With a signed agreement by both parties, you can establish the payment schedule that works best for you. This also establishes up front your set penalties for late or no payments. We actually stipulate in our agreement that we will not begin any work until the signed agreement is in house and the deposit payment has cleared. At the end of the project, we will not relinquish any files until final payment has been made.

5. Establish Ownership of Work and Usage Rights

Unfortunately, a lot of clients and designers believe that this is implicit in the exchange of funds for service. It actually isn’t. You must stipulate which party will own what exactly and their rights to that particular work. For example, let’s say you create a design for a poster, but the client turns around and uses the work for a t-shirt they are selling that becomes incredibly popular. Well, if you did not explicitly relinquish the rights to the design for a t-shirt, the client is in breach of contract.

Also, establish who owns the rights to the artwork if the relationship is severed before the end of the project. This, I learned the hard way. When I first started out, I took on a client who needed a DVD cover for their independent film. We sent over 4-5 different mock ups which were all rejected. The client eventually decided to use another service. Fast forward a few months later and I see the DVD cover on the shelf and it is strikingly similar to one of our mock ups. There was nothing I could do because I worked without the net of a contract.

I’m just starting out. What should I do?

Obviously, this is a task better handled by an attorney. But, you may be just starting out and you cannot quite afford an attorney’s fee for drafting contracts for each and every client. There are a few resources online you can use for little or no money. Once you have established a nice cash flow for your business, you should definitely have your past contracts reviewed and strictly use an attorney going forward.

• About.com Graphic Design Contract for Desktop Publishing (FREE)
• All Freelance Work: Developing A Contract (FREE)
• USLegalForms.com Service Contracts (US only – Purchase fee)
• Lawdepot.com Service Agreement (Draft a customized agreement online – Purchase fee)
• AIGA Standard Form of Agreement (FREE) provided by Joni Mueller
• 24 ways: Contract Killer provided by Ariel

Start your freelance business off on the right foot. Make sure you never work on a project without a contract and you will thank yourself in the long run. If you run into resistance from a potential client, then simply walk away from the situation. As Jacci Howard Bear states in About.com’s article, Never Work Without a Freelance Design Contract:

It doesn’t matter whether your client is a family member, a longtime associate, or someone that you just know is trustworthy, if you work without a design contract you and your business run a huge risk of not being taken seriously and you risk losing money, losing clients, and even losing friends.

You are now the owner of your own business and the only person solely responsible for the protection of that business. Start protecting it today and stop working under a handshake and a pat on the arm.

Why should I post an ad or search Craigslist’s job boards?

First and foremost, the service is absolutely free for you to use. And this is incredibly important if you are just starting out. There is no other service available that has the type of potential reach that Craigslist has that will not affect your operating cost. In fact, according to a recent report

The site serves over nine billion page views per month, putting it in 47th place overall among web sites world wide, ninth place overall among web sites in the United States (per Alexa.com on August 21, 2008), to over thirty million unique visitors. With over thirty million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives over two million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.

Where else can you get free advertising with these types of potential impressions? This alone should be reason enough to add this to your arsenal of free options to find client leads.

All that glitters, ain’t gold

Now you’ve decided to create an account for yourself and post your ad in your local Services » Creative or Services » Computer section of the site, where you will find the majority of graphic and web designer posts. The first thing you will notice is that you are not alone. There are literally hundreds of posts daily from like-minded designers, so understand from the start that you are not entering virgin territory. You will definitely be one of many, so keep this in mind when you create your post. You want something that will make your ad stand out over all of the other submissions. Be concise with your content and try to avoid “hyping” your services. Your portfolio will do that for you, so a brief overview of what you do, an image and a link back to your portfolio should be sufficient.

Also know that Craigslist places a limitation on how many posts you can create over one week. Your post will be active over the week and will expire on the seventh day. Once your ad expires, you simply log back into your account and re-post the previous ad. And you can even change the content if you think the previous ad was ineffective.

Are these people serious?

Remember how we stressed that this service is free? Well, that is also going to mean that you are going to run into posts from people that are, for the lack of a better word, ludicrous. Unfortunately, the following post is not uncommon.

I have a new clothing line that will be hitting stores very soon. It will mainly be an urban clothing line but we will cover a wide veriety of fashion. The clothing line is called [obscured] and we need a logo. There are no guide lines to what we are looking for. Give me your best and most creative ideas. The chosen logo will be paid $100 dollars. If there are any other designs that I would like to use that will not be our company logo, I am willing to pay $25 per designs.

More times than not, you are going to find these types of ads. Craigslist is filled to the brim with “bargain shoppers” and you will have to accept their existence and simply ignore the ad. And, though we personally find the “flame” responses to be humorous, we also think they are not necessary. You should conserve your energy and direct it at finding viable clients and hope that no designer worth their salt will respond to these types of ads.

What does this all mean to me?

Well, and we cannot stress this enough, if you are new and looking for clients, you cannot ignore this as a powerful tool. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, going to be your primary source of client leads. But, if it is not one of the things you are doing regularly, then you are doing yourself a disservice. Place an ad or two in your local Craigslist for a month and see what happens. Track the click through traffic using Google Analytics and see just how many people actually came from Craigslist to your site.

Also, answer the posts that you think are viable for you. Just know that there is a great chance that they may go unanswered. This is not necessarily a statement about your work or skill set. Posts requesting services usually generate an overwhelming amount of responses, most of which do not fit what the potential client is looking for. But, this should never be a deterrent for you answering an ad. Remember that clients are not going to seek you out until you have established yourself so you must do everything possible to grow your business.