“Your gravest mistake wasn’t failing to find the answer. If you keep asking the wrong questions, you’ll never find the right answer.” – Lee Woo-Jin, Oldboy, 2005

Oldboy is a fantastic film from South Korean director Park Chan-wook. Shown at Cannes in 2004, it saw a wide release in 2005 and is currently being remade (and Westernized) by Spike Lee. However, this isn’t a story about a movie. This is a story about a designer, mistakes, and lessons learned.

The story of Juan Luis Garcia, a designer from Los Angeles, California, blew up the twittersphere after he posted an open letter to Spike Lee over the treatment he received after being asked to do spec comps of key art posters for the Oldboy remake. Garcia says he was approached by an unnamed design firm and asked to create these designs, became a bit star-struck at the fact that Spike Lee was involved, and got mistreated and taken advantage of by said design firm. For fear of mistelling, I don’t want to get in to too much detail, so visit his site to read his open letter here: http://juanluisgarcia.com/dear-spike-lee/

I read the letter and I became angry for Juan. He was mistreated and that is an awful thing that hurts the industry. However, I cannot say that I have sympathy for him. He failed to protect himself from these sorts of things leaving him vulnerable. Most notably:

“We never signed any contracts or work-for-hire agreements…”

I’m honestly getting tired of hearing sad stories of designers who didn’t get paid or had people take advantage of them and then reading a sentence similar to this in their story. The most simple, basic thing you can do to protect yourself is to always have a contract. Always. There’s nothing more that can be said on the issue. Have something legally binding in place to protect yourself. If the person who wants to work with you isn’t willing to have one, you don’t want to work with them. Moreover, be willing to enforce it. A contract is just a piece of paper unless you’re willing to enforce it. If you’re not willing to do so, you may as well just wrap old gum up in it to throw it out. So, for those of you who are surely out there saying “Well, I had a contract and still got screwed over.” Did you enforce it?

Why wouldn’t someone enforce a contract? It would seem that having a legally binding document in place to protect yourself would be beneficial to you as a designer. It’s because there are designers that don’t realize what kind of power they have. Like Juan said…

“I couldn’t take another condescending phone call because I was ‘only a designer.”

They approached YOU to design something for them. Do you not see the hand that you have in this situation? In this kind of situation, it’s important to realize that you’re not working FOR them, you’re working WITH them. Stand up for yourself and do the right thing (pun not intended). Have a contract, enforce it, and don’t be afraid of a firm that tries to intimidate you for doing so. Are you scared of losing work? Oh, you mean all this spec work that will ruin your life and probably leave you unpaid? Why would you ever want to lose that? Good firms will not mind you having a contract because they realize the protect it provides you and them and it’s just good business.

Again, I’m angry at what happened to Juan Luis Garcia, but it could have been avoided. In a perfect world, every business relationship would be great. There would be no one trying to take advantage of other people’s work and we wouldn’t have to worry about having things stolen from us. However, this isn’t a perfect world. This design firm is seemingly full of scumbags who really mistreated Garcia. I hope he gets the recognition he deserves from his work but I also hope he learned something from all of this.

BTW Juan is a really good designer. Check out his work on his portfolio website.