Terms & Conditions
The following Terms and Conditions of Service apply to all products and services provided by Fearless Creative and in the event of any dispute are governed by the laws of England and Scotland.
All work is carried out by Fearless Creative on the understanding that the client has agreed to our terms and conditions.
Copyright is retained by Fearless Creative on all design work including words, pictures, ideas, visuals and illustrations unless specifically released in writing and after all costs have been settled.
If a choice of designs is presented and one is chosen for your project, only that solution is deemed to be given by us as fulfilling the contract. All other designs remain the property of Fearless Creative, unless specifically agreed in writing.
Project Acceptance
At the time of proposal, Fearless Creative will provide the customer with a written estimate or quotation by email. These Terms and Conditions can be read at any time on the Fearless Creative website.
A copy of the written estimate or quotation is to be signed and dated by the customer to indicate acceptance and should be returned to Fearless Creative.
Alternatively, the client may send an official purchase order in reply to the estimate or quotation which binds the client to accept our terms and conditions, or an email acknowledging acceptance of the quotation.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Fearless Creative Terms & Conditions are what govern the job, not any conditions on the customer’s purchase order.
Design Charges
Charges for design services to be provided by Fearless Creative will be set out in the written estimate or quotation that is provided to the customer. At the time of the customer’s signed acceptance of this estimate or quotation, indicating acceptance of the Terms & Conditions, a non-refundable payment of 50% of the quoted fee will become immediately due.
Unless agreed otherwise with the Client, all design services require an advance payment of a minimum of fifty (50) percent of the project quotation total before the work commences or is supplied to the Client for review. The remaining fifty (50) percent of the project quotation total will be due upon completion of the work prior to upload to the server or release of materials.
Source Files
We will supply proofs and PDF files as appropriate for printing, or other graphic files as detailed in the job scope or request.
Charges for design work do not cover the release of our copyright design source files, including but not restricted to indd, psd, AI, png, fla or other source files or raw code; if the Client requires these files for transfer to an in-house or other designer, they will be subject to a separate quotation or ‘buy-out’ charge.
Charges for Other Services
Charges for any additional services requested during the project that are over and above the estimated time or out of scope, will become fully payable (100% of the quoted amount) at the time of estimate or quotation acceptance.
Payment
The customer will be provided with an Approval Form or Proof Email, and an Invoice prior to final publication. At this time the remainder of the amount due will become payable and the customer will also be required to sign and return the Approval Form or signify approval by email to Fearless Creative.
Any invoice queries must be submitted by email within 14 days of the invoice date.
Accounts which remain outstanding for 30 days after the date of invoice, will incur late payment interest charge at the Bank of England Base Rate plus 8% on the outstanding amount from the date due until the date of payment.
Payments may be made by online transfer, credit card (Visa, Mastercard) or Debit Card.
Payments made by cheque must be previously agreed and may be subject to an administration charge. Cheques should not be sent in regular mail unless sent recorded delivery.
Publication and/or release of work done by Fearless Creative on behalf of the client, may not take place before cleared funds have been received.
Returned cheques will incur an additional fee of £50 per returned cheque. Fearless Creative reserves the right to consider an account to be in default in the event of a returned cheque.
Default
An account shall be considered default if it remains unpaid for 30 days from the date of invoice, or following a returned cheque. Fearless Creative shall be entitled to remove Fearless Creative’s and/or the customer’s material from any and all computer systems, until the amount due has been fully paid. This includes any and all unpaid monies due for services, including, but not limited to, hosting, domain registration, search engine submission, design and maintenance, sub-contractors, printers, photographers and libraries.
Removal of such materials does not relieve the customer of its obligation to pay the due amount.
Customers whose accounts become default agree to pay all Fearless Creative’s reasonable legal and accounting expenses and third party collection agency fees in the enforcement of the debt and these Terms and Conditions.
Copyrights and Trademarks
By supplying text, images and other data to Fearless Creative for inclusion in the customer’s website or other medium, the customer declares that it holds the appropriate copyright and/or trademark permissions. The ownership of such materials will remain with the customer, or rightful copyright or trademark owner.
Any artwork, images, or text supplied and/or designed by Fearless Creative on behalf of the customer, will remain the property of Fearless Creative and/or its suppliers unless otherwise agreed in writing. A licence for use of the copyright material is granted to the customer solely for the project defined in the scope or request and not for any other purpose.
The customer may request in writing from Fearless Creative, the necessary permission to use materials (for which Fearless Creative holds the copyright) in forms other than for which it was originally supplied, and Fearless Creative may, at its discretion, grant this and may charge for the additional usage. Such permission must be obtained in writing before any of the aforesaid artwork, images, text, or other data is used.
Any software, code, plugin or other third party material used in a web or digital project remains the property of the creator and any ongoing licence fees or fees for upgrades are the responsibility of the client, not Fearless Creative.
By supplying images, text, or any other data to Fearless Creative, the customer grants Fearless Creative permission to use this material freely in the pursuit of the design.
Should Fearless Creative, or the customer supply an image, text, audio clip or any other file for use in a website, multimedia presentation, print item, exhibition, advertisement or any other medium believing it to be copyright and royalty free, which subsequently emerges to have such copyright or royalty usage limitations, the customer will agree to allow Fearless Creative to remove and/or replace the file on the site.
The customer agrees to fully indemnify and hold Fearless Creative free from harm in any and all claims resulting from the customer in not having obtained all the required copyright, and/or any other necessary permissions.
Alterations
The customer agrees that changes required over and above the estimated work, or in addition to the agreed scope, or where the client makes changes to the supplied copy or changes required to be carried out after acceptance of the draft design, will be liable to a separate charge.
The customer also agrees that Fearless Creative holds no responsibility for any amendments made by any third party, before or after a design is published.
Licensing
Any design, copywriting, drawing, idea or code created for the customer by Fearless Creative, or any of its contractors, is licensed for use by the client on a one-time only basis and may not be modified, re-used, or re-distributed in any way or form without the express written consent of Fearless Creative and any of its relevant sub-contractors.
All design work – where there is a risk that another party make a claim, should be registered by the client with the appropriate authorities prior to publishing or first use or searches and legal advice sought as to its use.
Fearless Creative will not be held responsible for any and all damages resulting from such claims.
Fearless Creative is not responsible for any loss, or consequential loss, non-delivery of products or services, of whatever cause. The customer agrees not to hold Fearless Creative responsible for any such loss or damage.
Any claim against Fearless Creative shall be limited to the relevant fee(s) paid by the customer.
Data Formats
The client agrees to Fearless Creative’s definition of acceptable means of supplying data to the company.
Text is to be supplied to Fearless Creative in electronic format as standard text (.txt), MS Word (.docx) or via e-mail / FTP or shared folder.
Images which are supplied in an electronic format are to be provided in a format as prescribed by Fearless Creative via e-mail / FTP. Images must be of a quality suitable for use without any subsequent image processing, and Fearless Creative will not be held responsible for any image quality which the client later deems to be unacceptable.
Fearless Creative cannot be held responsible for the quality of any images which the client wishes to be scanned from printed materials.
Additional expenses may be incurred for any necessary action, including, but not limited to, photography and art direction, photography searches, media conversion, digital image processing, or data entry services, colour correction and alteration of images
Design Project Duration
Any indication given by Fearless Creative of a design project’s duration is to be considered by the customer to be an estimation. Fearless Creative cannot be held responsible for any project over-runs, whatever the cause. Estimated project duration should be deemed to be from the date that cleared funds are received by Fearless Creative for the initial payment or by date confirmed in writing by Fearless Creative.
Rights of Access for Website Construction
The client agrees to allow Fearless Creative all necessary access to computer systems and other locations, as required, in order to complete a website project and until all due funds are cleared, including the necessary read/write permissions, usernames and passwords.
The customer also agrees to allow Fearless Creative access to any computer systems, usernames and passwords required to remove data and/or sites for failure to comply with these Terms and Conditions.
The customer agrees to supply Fearless Creative with all necessary materials, electronic, or otherwise, required to create and complete the project, and to supply them in a timely manner.
Design Project Completion
Fearless Creative considers the design project complete upon receipt of the customer’s signed Approval form or signoff email. Other services such as printing, display panel production, filmwork, website uploading, publishing etc either contracted on the client’s behalf constitute a separate project and can be treated as a separate charge.
Website design
Design
We will create a design for the look-and-feel, layout and functionality of your web site. This work includes one main design, which will be based upon any style guidance that you give us up front, and our knowledge of best practice in this area.
We want you to be entirely happy with the end result, and we know that requirements often change during the design process. You will have the opportunity to make revisions to the design, during which process we will make every effort to revise the web site to your satisfaction.
This is subject to our ‘two key rules’ that are detailed further below.
However, you should be aware that the fee quoted in this agreement is based upon our estimate of the amount of work required to achieve the objective, and that repeated changes of requirements can lead to substantially more work being required on our part. As a result, if you’re not happy with the designs following these two stages of revisions, we reserve the right to invoice you for payment in full for all of the work that we have produced until that point and you may either cancel this contract or continue to commission us to make further design revisions at a daily rate that would be advised at the time.
Implementation
When we have agreement between us about the final design for the website, we implement that website (i.e. make it ‘live’ on the Internet) on an agreed schedule, and using whatever hosting arrangement we have agreed.
Unless agreed otherwise, that ‘go-live’ date will represent the completion of this particular project and you will be invoiced for the agreed amounts, minus any deposit already paid.
From this point onwards, any ongoing work, amendments or monitoring of your website will be dependent upon the support arrangement that we have agreed.
Hosting
When we are providing website hosting
We will provide website hosting facilities via our own Virtual Private servers. We warrant that these hosting facilities are fit for purpose, and we work hard to ensure that they provide as close to 100% uptime and appropriate performance as is possible.
However, no system can guarantee 100% uptime and there will be occasions, either as a result of planned maintenance or unanticipated technical issues, when your website may be unavailable or operating at a less-than-optimum level of performance. We will always endeavour to ensure that scheduled maintenance occurs at low-traffic times/days, although this may not always be possible, such as for essential security updates. In the event of unanticipated technical issues, we will always work to resolve them as quickly as possible, although we make no specific guarantees of time-to-fix. You should inform us before signing this agreement if you have specific requirements relating to time-to-fix so that we can consider the technical options and revise our quotation accordingly.
When we are using a 3rd party hosting service
You should understand that the performance and reliability of 3rd party shared hosting can be variable as, by its nature, it is shared with other customers – and while we will always be happy to advise on appropriate hosting solutions, we cannot be responsible for any failure on the part of the 3rd party host.
All shared hosting must offer the following minimum requirements:
- It must be based on a Linux operating system
- It must support at least one MySQL database within your chosen hosting package;
- It must support the PHP scripting language (in the most current stable version)
- We will require access to your hosting control panel for configuration purposes.
You should be aware that no system can guarantee 100% uptime and there will be occasions, either as a result of planned maintenance or unanticipated technical issues, when your website may be unavailable or operating at a less-than-optimum level of performance. We will always do everything within our control to minimise the impact and duration of any planned or unscheduled downtime, but we make no specific guarantees of time-to-fix. You should inform us before signing this agreement if you have specific requirements relating to time-to-fix so that we can consider the technical options and revise our quotation accordingly.
3rd party access to hosting servers
When we are providing standard hosting via our own Virtual Private Servers, we will not grant website administrator-level access to any 3rd parties (such as SEO or marketing agencies). Likewise, we will not grant access via FTP, SSH or similar to the webserver, database server or any other part of the VPS infrastructure. This is to protect the security and integrity of our virtual hosting environment.
Should you require such 3rd party access, we will be happy to provide a quotation for the provision of dedicated hosting or suitable 3rd party hosting.
Support
We believe that websites are not ‘one-and-done’ pieces of work; they should be looked after, updated and maintained to ensure that they remain secure, accurate and relevant. For this reason, we offer a number of levels of chargeable ongoing support, and it is your choice whether and to what extent you take advantage of this support.
We will provide both technical and non-technical support services to You, depending on the level of support that you have chosen.
Technical support includes:
- Routine technical and security updates to the core components and additional extensions that power your web site;
- Routine backups of Your entire website (content, functionality and data), including off-site storage of those backups to allow for restoration of your web site following a technical issue;
- Ongoing security scans of website traffic in order to take all reasonable precautions to identify and block malicious traffic.
Non-technical support:
- We are always happy to try to help you with questions, advice and change requests that relate to your web site.
Please note: Where we are providing web hosting services to you (and your website is therefore located on our servers), it is mandatory that you take at least technical support services from us. This ensures that your website is kept up-to-date and secure, which protects not only your site but the security of our servers also. If you choose to host your website on 3rd party servers, there is no obligation to take any form of support services from us – but the responsibility for updates, security, backups and so forth is then yours.
Our ‘Two Key Rules’
A properly planned project will rarely give rise to any significant issues. However, our experience has shown a couple of circumstances that can create difficulties, so we like to be clear about them here.
- Repeated changes to requirements: we pride ourselves in providing flexibility throughout our projects, so that clients don’t feel that everything needs to be ‘set in stone’ from the outset. However, the price that we quote for a piece of work is calculated on the estimated time required to achieve the objective. Repeated changes to requirements result in significant rework, and can result in the project becoming commercially non-viable. We therefore ask that all requirements, and changes thereto, are properly considered by you in order to minimise unnecessary rework. We may ask you to put change requests in writing, and ultimately we may suspend the project and invoice you for the work completed to date, if the requirements have changed substantially from what was agreed at the outset.
- Early Termination of the Project: sometimes, for reasons beyond the scope of the project itself, a client will decide to discontinue the project. A simple example of which would be when the website was simply not required any longer due to a change in the business requirements. Under these circumstances, the website may not ‘go-live’ at all, but we think that it is only fair that we be paid for the work that we have completed up until this point. Further details can be found under in the Payment section below.
Testing
We will test all our markup and CSS in current versions of all major browsers, specifically Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.
We will not test these templates in old or abandoned browsers, for example Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or earlier Windows or Mac, or previous versions of Apple’s Safari, Mozilla Firefox or Opera unless otherwise specified. If you need to show the same or similar visual design to visitors using these older browsers, we will charge you at an agreed daily rate for any necessary additional code and its testing.
Text content
We are not responsible for writing any final text copy unless we specified it in the original estimate. We’ll be happy to help though, but if we become substantially required to create content, in addition to the estimate we reserve the right to charge you at £25 per hour for copy writing or content input.
Photographs
If the project involves the provision of photographs, You will supply us such images either in digital or printed format, which must be of a suitable quality and resolution and be fit for purpose. If you choose to buy stock photographs we can suggest vendors of stock photography. We reserve the right to refuse to work with any images that we consider to be inappropriate, offensive or in breach of intellectual property laws.
For the avoidance of doubt, the cost of sourcing any imagery for your website (which may or may not be required) is not included within the quoted project cost.
Domain Registration
Fearless Creative cannot guarantee the availability of any domain name. Where Fearless Creative is to register a domain name on behalf of a client it will endeavour to do so but the client should not assume a successful registration.
Search Engine Submission
You should therefore understand that the website design itself (our remit) is only part of the SEO story, and search engine rankings are also dependent upon factors outside our control. We are happy to advise, but for the avoidance of doubt, unless expressly agreed otherwise, we are not providing SEO services as part of this agreement beyond best practice design and on-page optimisation (we will be happy to discuss the specific meaning of these terms).
We therefore cannot make any assurances about Google rankings, or search engine results more broadly.
Design Credits
The customer agrees to allow Fearless Creative to place a small credit on printed material exhibition displays, advertisements and/or a link to Fearless Creative own website on the customer’s website. This will usually be in the form of a small logo or line of text placed towards the bottom of the page.
The customer also agrees to allow Fearless Creative to place websites and other designs, along with a link to the client’s site on Fearless Creative’s own website for demonstration purposes and to use any designs in its own publicity and portfolios.
Rights of Refusal
Fearless Creative will not include in its designs, any text, images or other data which it deems to be immoral, offensive, obscene or illegal. All advertising material must conform to all standards laid down by all relevant advertising standards authorities. Fearless Creative also reserves the right to refuse to include submitted material without giving reason. In the situation where any images and/or data that Fearless Creative does include in all good faith, and subsequently discovers is in contravention to such Terms and Conditions, the customer is obliged to allow Fearless Creative to remove the contravention without hindrance, or penalty. Fearless Creative is to be held in no way responsible for any such data being included.
Cancellation
Cancellation of orders may be made initially by telephone contact, or e-mail, however, following this, Fearless Creative will need formal notification in writing to the company’s postal address. The client will then be invoiced for all work completed over and above the non-refundable deposit that will have been made at the time of first ordering. The balance of monies due must be paid within 30 days. Please note: any cancellation which is not formally confirmed in writing and received by Fearless Creative within 14 days of such instruction being issued, will be liable for the full quoted cost of the project.
Disclaimer
Fearless Creative makes no warranties of any kind, express or implied, for any and all products and/or services that it supplies. Fearless Creative will not be held responsible for any and all damages resulting from products and/or services it supplies. Fearless Creative is not responsible for any loss, or consequential loss of data, or non-delivery of products or services, of whatever cause. While we take reasonable steps to investigate the materials we recommend, we accept no responsibility for the performance or quality of materials or any consequential loss arising from their failure. The customer agrees not to hold Fearless Creative responsible for any such loss or damage. Any claim against Fearless Creative shall be limited to the relevant fee(s) paid by the customer.
Fearless Creative reserves the right to use the services of sub-contractors, agents and suppliers and any work, content, services and usage is bound by their Terms and Conditions. Fearless Creative will not knowingly perform any actions to contravene these and the client also agrees to be so bound.
Fearless Creative and its clients agree to comply with Printers Terms and Conditions which include disclaimers for non-completion on time and the flexibility to supply quantities within 10% of the total ordered. Fearless Creative recommend that if an exact quantity is required, then 10% extra is added to the quantity and extra time made available should the job be delayed.
General
These Terms and Conditions supersede any previous Terms and Conditions distributed in any form. Fearless Creative reserves the right to change any rates and any of the Terms and Conditions at any time and without prior notice.
Acceptance of Terms and Conditions and Quotation
The placement of an order for design and/or any other services offered by Fearless Creative, by email, verbally or in writing, is deemed to be acceptance of these terms and conditions, which are freely available at https://fearlesscreative.co.uk.
An estimate validated by the customer’s signature on the estimate or quotation form, or by email, constitutes acceptance of the estimate or quotation and agreement to comply fully with all the Terms and Conditions and forms a Contract for Business between the signatory and Fearless Creative.