Avoid Non-Paying Clients With Watermarks

Cartoon bear artwork with â€œPROOFâ€ watermark It’s going to happen you you eventually — a client who doesn’t pay their bill. And unless the project was for a significant amount of money, the unfortunate truth is that many times it isn’t worth the cost of suing. The legal fees can very quickly outweigh the money you’ll get, and that’s the positive side!

Because of this, I make it a standard practice to ask for a 50% deposit for all work before starting a project. But this only covers you so far. I also do not transfer any high-resolution or vector art until the final balance is paid, but sometimes this doesn’t cover your butt — for example, the client may only want to use the art on their website, or may have no clue about proper printing resolutions and will go ahead an use the low-resolution JPEG preview images you’ve been sending them.

A very simple solution to this problem: watermark your images. A simple extra layer in Photoshop with the word “PROOF”, with the color set to 100% magenta and the opacity from 5 to 15% is all it takes. It just needs to be there enough to be readable, but not obscuring the art. Another very good reason to do this is to ensure that when the final art finally sent, the preliminary art is never used. This is the standard reason to use the “PROOF” watermark, but the great thing is that it solves two problems with one solution.

The best thing to do is just to start incorporating this technique as part of your habit when sending any files to any client — even long-standing clients. Sketches, color studies, JPEG vector art previews, layouts, PDF— you name it. As mentioned above, not only does it ensure the proper final files are used, but also protects you from unsavory types out there. By incorporating this into your standard procedure for sending files, you not only get in the habit of doing it (so you won’t forget), but also you’ll work out that naggging thought that “this client is cool, I don’t need to worry about protecting my art this time”. By doing this across the board with every single client & project, you avoid any second thoughts.

To be honest, I am not consistent with this myself, and part of the impetus behind this blog post is to get me focused. For most of your projects and clients, this will (hopefully) be unnecessary 99% of the time. It’s that 1% time that you’ll be avoiding, and those usually come up when they are least convenient — whether financially or deadline-wise. Every time the usefulness of this comes up and smacks me on the head, I always think to myself “why am I not watermarking these images?”. So, here’s to a new start.

by George Coghill -
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