How To Avoid the Pitfalls of Cheap Creative Work

Under­stand­ing the impor­tance of invest­ing in your busi­ness can help you avoid the poten­tial pit­falls and con­se­quences of going the cheap route — espe­cial­ly when it comes to design. What­ev­er the size of a com­pa­ny, each has a bud­get. When allo­cat­ing avail­able funds to get the biggest return, one place that might seem easy to cut cor­ners can be in cre­at­ing your visu­al iden­ti­ty, and use of images/photos. Scrimp­ing on these can impact your busi­ness in many ways. Some can be small but some can become cat­a­stroph­ic. NCD wants to help you pre­vent those mistakes!

Past clients whose logo resem­bled anoth­er estab­lished busi­ness or who unwit­ting­ly used copy­right­ed pho­tos got Cease and Desist let­ters from an attor­ney say­ing they had to either pay or take it down or both, ASAP. It’s esti­mat­ed that legal woes cost com­pa­nies 100 BILLION dol­lars per year.

How to prevent costly mistakes:[tdivider style=“underline” color=“#222222”]

SET PRIORITY MONEY ASIDE

Estab­lish a bud­get from the begin­ning for your brand­ing, web­site, and col­lat­er­al. Your logo is non-nego­tiable when it comes to a pri­or­i­ty line item for those funds.

Think of it as an invest­ment – and more, a pro­fes­sion­al neces­si­ty. Don’t under­es­ti­mate this: you can pay a LOT more in dam­ages if you are involved in a copy­right suit. Ser­vices such as imagerights.com search the inter­net for unau­tho­rized uses of a pho­tog­ra­pher’s images, often result­ing in law­suits. Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Michael Grec­co uses it, say­ing in an arti­cle on PDN.com, “My col­lec­tions for infringe­ment far sur­pass rev­enues I was get­ting ten years ago for my syn­di­ca­tion and cre­ative stock, when that mar­ket was a viable mar­ket.” He filed 8.7 mil­lion dol­lar suit after find­ing a lot of his work was being used. (Source: Graph­ic Artist Guild hand­book). You just don’t want to risk it!

CONTRACT A PRO

If a design­er puts out quick work, it’s not the qual­i­ty you and your com­pa­ny deserves! You want some­one who will take the time to real­ly under­stand you and your brand and align with your mis­sion and val­ues. And any­one worth their salt is well aware of trade­mark issues. And this should be not­ed in your con­tract with your designer.

Accord­ing to FTI Con­sult­ing Inc, 3500 trade­mark cas­es are filed in US dis­trict courts each year. That num­ber would be great­ly reduced if com­pa­nies invest­ed in using the right peo­ple to cre­ate their designs from the get go. A pro­fes­sion­al design­er is anoth­er lay­er of pro­tec­tion from loss­es and legal­i­ties and well worth it.

DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK

The place to save mon­ey is in doing your own process of dis­cov­ery in prepa­ra­tion to meet with your design­er: hon­ing your ideas, iden­ti­fy­ing your demo­graph­ics, and ham­mer­ing out your brand val­ues (what mat­ters most in terms of product/services, rev­enues, and cus­tomer relationships/satisfaction). Meet­ing your design­er with this done not only saves quite a bit, it brings more val­ue to your dol­lars by help­ing them come up with a bet­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion of who you unique­ly are.

AVOID LOGO WOES

Logos seem to be the most vul­ner­a­ble. A design sim­i­lar­i­ty between the logos of two Wound­ed War­rior groups result­ed in a law­suit that took a whop­ping $72,000 to defend.

Even jokes can turn into law suit. Jim­my Winkel­mann did a spoof on his col­lege pals who wore North Face cloth­ing by cre­at­ing a com­pa­ny call­ing itself the South Butt. He used their icon, flip­ping it upside down. Although it was just for fun, he got served! They set­tled out of court, but you get the pic­ture. You do not want this to be you.

If you want a mem­o­rable logo, to have your mate­ri­als be a true reflec­tion of the mis­sion and appeals to your tar­get mar­ket, you want to work with some­one who will pro­vide the exper­tise you deserve. And that per­son will have the time to present you with authen­tic designs while mak­ing sure the images and con­tent they are using aren’t infring­ing on any copyrights.

SOURCE ONLY LEGAL IMAGES

Once your brand is estab­lished with a design­er, you may con­tin­ue to build it on your own in blog posts and on social media. Peo­ple grab from Google Images or share found pic­tures all the time. But beware: If you share some­thing from anoth­er’s blog posts or online arti­cles, reach out per­son­al­ly to the own­er and get their writ­ten per­mis­sion to be sure you can use it. Even if you back-link to them it may not be enough.

On her blog, LivingforNaptime.com, Chrystie shared how she made a huge blog­ging mis­take for using an image a green pep­per. She received a Cease and Desist let­ter, and so took it down. But it did­n’t stop there. The pho­tog­ra­ph­er asked for $750 for the pho­to which quick­ly ran up to $7500 for the dam­ages. After much angst and valu­able hours lost to research, she set­tled for a bit less… and wrote to warn oth­ers how to avoid it!

We sug­gest you research stock image com­pa­nies from which to pur­chase your images legal­ly. Here are a few we rec­om­mend: AdobeStock.com, GraphicStock.com, iStockPhoto.com, 500px.com, ThinkStock.com, ShutterStock.com, CreativeMarket.com.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this sub­ject! Let us know below: