Please find our simple terms and conditions below.
Our simple terms and conditions relating to printed matter can be viewed here.
These terms are designed to give you a simple overview of what trading with us entails. Our full legal terms and conditions are available to view here.
SkyBlue Design Rates 2014-15
Full corporate rate for our services is £50 per hour.
Discount rate for print/lifetime clients is £37.50 per hour.
Contract rate is £37.50 per hour
Concept drawings, roughs, and meeting time is £20 per hour (meetings subject to £37.50 call-out for first hour and £20ph thereafter).
These costs are ex VAT.
Billing/Estimating Procedure:
An estimate will be provided for your work in the first instance. Once your estimate is accepted, an invoice will be issued for the commencement of the work, to its full estimated value. You may pay 50% or 100% of the value, at your discretion, to start the job.
Once started, we will provide regular updates and proofs. During this procedure if the work remit expands and work is estimated to take a longer or shorter time than originally quoted, your estimate will be revised upwards or downwards and we will provide notice for your approval. You may at your discretion cancel a job at any time but the work already completed will be chargeable at the current estimated rate.
Should work extend past the end of a calendar month, in the event that the work was invoiced on or before the 15th day of the preceding month, an interim bill will be issued covering work completed thus far, together with an in-progress report and updated estimate of time required.
All invoices must be settled before any work is released.
Client Liaison
For any project exceeding 10 hours, liaison time is free of charge for up to 20% of the creative time ordered; this cap is increased to 25% over 20 hours. For example if you commission a design project taking 18 hours you are entitled to up to 3.6 hours of meeting & planning time free of charge in addition to the 18 hours of actual paid work. If you commission a website taking 35 hours you are entitled to 8.75 hours planning & meeting time. If your work suggests under an hour of liasion time, any personal meetings required may be chargeable at your standard billing rate.
Rates Explanation
Full corporate rate for our services is for design, photography and web design only. Its much more intended for large projects and branding where the final branding becomes property of another company for long-term use. For corporate work once complete the intellectual property right to the finished, flattened artwork, logo, fonts and components of the logo & brand, pass to the client.
For discount or contract rate the customer would generally be ordering regularly and paying for their work pro forma. Once complete, the right to the usage of the piece of finished, flattened artwork passes to the client, however components, fonts and any emblems designed remain property of SkyBlue.
Contract rate may be provided if the company uses us for all their design, print & web requirements or for more than 6 jobs per year. Unless otherwise stated SkyBlue retain rights for work done under contract to our source code, the components & parts we have used for the design & web design, and the client owns the rights to a) in the case of creative design, the finished piece of artwork, at the finished size for unlimited use; size changes or redesigns would have to be paid for, or b) in the case of websites, the site as designed and briefed to be accessible by your customers with code resident on our servers, to complete the brief provided.
The whole point is to provide you with the best possible service at the best possible rate. However you should read these qualifications carefully, for example if we design a site for you trying to keep the billed hours down as much as possible, later on changing its design theme or skin, or adding editability to particular pages, may not be possible without rebuilding sections of the site in their entirety. Passing the work done to another company may not be possible as your site contains pre-written code by us that has kept the actual code-writing time down to as low as possible to keep your price low. Therefore if you have future expansion plans its best to discuss them in advance as otherwise we will cost the job on a single-usage basis, i.e. the best rate, method, and approach, for your particular application at the time ordered.
You may be on a mixed rate; for example if you use us for some print work the design for that will be reduced to contract rate; any work you place for advertising or print elsewhere might be charged at corporate rate.
Free Artworking
From time to time and at our absolute discretion, we may work on clients’ artwork to improve it before printing, free of charge. This can be from something as simple as replacing poor quality logos with versions we hold on file, up to completely redrawing a piece of artwork. While this may take a short period of time, this does not imply ownership. The edited files will be retained for use by SkyBlue and unless any written agreement has been made to provide the edited files back to the client without charge, should the client wish to obtain these master files for usage or printing elsewhere, we reserve the right to charge £37.50 + VAT per full or part hour undertaken for this work, whenever the request may be made. Performance of this service does not confer rights, and we may work on one part of your artwork at our complete discretion, without working on the remainder. Where this is done we will inform the client we have done so, and provide new proofs. Should the client then wish for the remainder of the work to be upgraded also, we reserve the right to charge for either this work, or the total work completed at our prevailing rates.
Timescales
You should supply a brief which clearly shows layout, content, colour scheme, size and orientation together with all photos, logos and text in digital format for us to work from. Please do not submit artwork briefs and expect it to be completed same-day. Although we prefer not to, we would rather have a brief from you to complete the creative side of the work in good time, and then content details later on, than everything in one go at the last minute. On submission of your brief we will generally return a simple proof within 48-72 hours and a more complex proof within 4-5 working days. Thereafter as a general rule if changes are submitted before 12pm midday you should see a revised proof the same day, after which it will be the following day. This does of course depend on the complexity of the changes required and our current production workload.
Usage & Rights
When design work is done, you own the final high-resolution files at the size designed, and may distribute them wherever you wish, you may reproduce them at any size and quantity including digital media such as Facebook. However any motifs, fonts, and constituent parts used to make up the design such as background images, stock photography etc are licensed for that single use only and remain our property or the property of the respective copyright holder. If you have not ordered and paid for a proper brand identity then any ‘logo’ created and/or used within your design does not automatically become your copyright but remains the property of SkyBlue and accordingly we may re-use and rework our own property in more than one location. Any logos etc provided by the client remain their property but you agree to allow us full use of and access to them in order to allow us to carry out our duties effectively.
Fonts & Stock Photography
You do not by virtue of using in a paid-for concept, own the fonts which we may have paid for, stock photography, or separated images and files. Should you wish us to produce a brand toolkit* for a particular event or concept this is not only at our discretion but not always possible without buying outright certain pieces of stock imagery used. Therefore such work must be quoted for seperately. Any imagery supplied by you the client is accepted on the basis that you have obtained rights to usage and indemnify SkyBlue and our subsidiaries and partners against any action arising from use.
* i.e. a toolkit which can be given to another company with all constituent parts of your artwork split up, bought for infinite usage or a license transferred, items then masked, vectors created, labelled, etc. The third party can then create design items, signage, larger formats, or other materials or media such as a website from these parts, without infringing on anybody’s copyright.
Storing Artwork
We will create further designs from items held for you under the rearrangement fees quoted above. This is on the basis you are printing with us. Should you wish us to produce artwork for other companies to print we can do this; the hourly rate is £50 instead of £37.50. We will hold artwork on file for a minimum of 6 months, and indefinitely for clients using us regularly (more than once per year) for print or design. However storage of artwork is at your own risk; SkyBlue can accept no liability for any loss, third party, consequential or otherwise occasioned by our failure to store artwork securely. Should you engage us to produce artwork only, at any point we will happily provide artwork or info in varying formats to another company with reference purely to how long it takes us to prepare, and usually with no charge. However we reserve the right to charge £15 per request should we have to engage in unnecessary reworking at our end due to other firms’ inability to process industry-standard files, having to respond immediately to last-minute requests, couriering CDs, late-night requests etc.
Extracting Motifs & Logos from Concepts
If you have paid for a single design such as a leaflet or flyer, and later request a logo or other constituent part to be broken out from it for your usage elsewhere or within signage, branding, etc, we reserve the right to charge for additional time incurred. If you have not paid for a logo design and we have created a logo or motif within a flyer, we reserve the right should you then wish to use this on all your materials to impose our standard fee for a logo design of £50 for a motif within a flyer, £100 for a simple brand and £250 for a complex brand. Simply put we always try to keep work to the minimum time and most effective way of doing things and clients should not necessarily assume that items can be split from existing artwork, or that commission of a single job entitles them to a continued unpaid artworking service. We will always endeavour to be reasonable but clients undertake to pay for all work ordered up to a maximum of £50 per full or part hour, excluding VAT, and for time in preparing CDs or emails to other printers or advertising agents of up to £15 per delivery.
Refund & Cancellation Policy
Should you cancel a job halfway through, any package rate agreed becomes invalid and we will revert to an hourly rate for billing. Total hours incurred or 70% of the originally quoted job cost, which ever is the greatest, will be billed.
Should you wish to place a job on hold whether definitely or indefinitely, we reserve the right to charge this same calculated figure to cover our interim costs, with the remainder of the originally quoted job cost payable when the work recommences. Should the brief substantially alter when the work is re-ordered, we reserve the right to treat the order as a completely new one.
With regards to liability unless you have an account application form filled in, submitted and approved with SkyBlue then all work must be paid for before the job is started. Should you or any other member of your organisation place an order with us, we will require payment for that order before another order can be commenced. You agree as a condition of trading with SkyBlue that once a member of your organisation places an order or passes instructions to us, you allow that such persons are authorised to place orders with us and that you will honour the payment for such, until such time as you inform us formally that the person in question is no longer a member of your organisation.