Need Your Help PLEASE!!!

Recently I have been working on a logo design for a band, u may have seen a previous thread of mine with some ideas but this is what I have come up with in the end:



Now the question I have for you is how to go about payment methods.
At first I was feeling that this would only be something to put in my portfolio and was not worried at all about payment, but that seems to have changed due to the e-mail I have recently recieved from the client.


E-MAIL RECIEVED:

Also I need to talk to you about the boring legal stuff sorry!
We'd like to sign you up to a contract with us.
Basically it would cover the artwork we'd like you to do, the copyright + publishing rights etc, and how you'd prefer us to pay you - a flat fee for each piece or a percentage of royalties, whichever you'd like.
We've all become such fans of your work we'd love it if you could come on board as our official artist. This would mean that all our art, be it album covers, t-shirts or website art would be done by you.
In return we'd also add a link to your gallery from our website giving you another way to advertise and sell your other work.
The contract will at first only cover the time period round the release of the first EP but will roll over unless anything changes.
The reason we’ll do it this way is so we can review the contract and increase your fee as we go along. How does that all sound to you?
A lot to take in at once I know!


So which option do you think would be best for me, I have not had much experience with this area of the logo world and was hopeing I could get some help from the pro's on this site. I was leaning more towards the flat fee rate but what would be the way of determining what to charge? I have I would say 8 hours in it so far due to the changes that they wanted

SOME EARLIER DESIGNS:



Any help would be greatly appreciated......Thanks

That is tuff about the payment.
I have some, not a lot of experiance with payment set ups such as this.

The first time I designed a product for the company I asked for a flat fee and it wasn't much cause I hadn't learned CAD well enough. But here was my MISTAKE.. The company went to sell hundreds of thousands of my designed product and if I would of taken the 10% I would still be making money off it.

Similar situation, same company different product I asked for a flat fee plus 3.5%. The design was spot on and sold but the manufacture of the product didn't have strong enough welds so the product ended up being pulled and just recently went back into production but not sure how it's going to do because of the first shipment flaws.

Other I've done has just be a straight fee cause of the small amount of time I spent on em.

If you think the band will sell ALOT of albums shirts ect with your work on it. I'd go for the %.. or even a better set up is a decent initial fee, like maybe 50-75% of what you'd charge plus a royalty fee.
What ever you do make sure you have a lawyer look it over. Say they offer your 10% for royalties for just the ablums, but they use it on shirts, hats, cups etc. your missing out on more money. So be sure you add anything and everything they may add your work to sell. and a specific percentage for each. I've lost out on many dallors because I thought I could trust someone...Don't let it happen to you.

Other then my 2 cents. great looking design.

Edit: Make sure you set up a way that you can see what's selling if you go with the % cause they (they're accountant) could screw you over there also.

Edited by Coy, 30 December 2008 - 11:00 PM.

Thanks for the info, very helpful, I now have some things I need to look into.

Depend if the band is really big royalties can sometimes be more worth than a flat fee. But mostly you can do a partial royalty and flat fee. Because if the band is not going to be good you might end up getting nothing. You could also ask if you could do flat fees at the moment and change to royalties in the future.

Thanks for the advice, what would you suggest for a flat fee rate. Like I said I have about 8 hours in the design with not much to go on in the beginning so they had at least 5 revision requests as you can see by the second image in the thread. I have a few prior professional clients but am not huge in the biz, kinda starting back into it recently, at $50 an hour thats $400.00 or if I chose roylaties and flat rate I was thinking 200.00 and 5%....idunno? I was reading on a site that under 15% is reasonable for just a royalty claim.

What ya think?

I would avoid accepting royalty agreements in lieu of hourly compensation... Unless this band is REALLY REALLY good.... I mean, like Beatles good... you may never get paid what you put into it.
When I establish flat rates for my clients, I outline a set of deliverables... For example, on an album artwork project, I would offer 3 concepts (total 3 hours), Revisions on 1 concept (total 3 hours) & 1 final (Prep for Output total 2 hours) for $400 (8 hours x $50)... I would also advise my client that anything beyond what is promised in the deliverables will be charged at my regular hourly rate of $50/hr.
Nice work and good luck!