Terms

01Who these terms are between

"We" and "us" mean Tyson Cottam, a sole proprietor trading as cottam.design. "You" means the person or company paying for the service. Starting a subscription means you accept these terms; if you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you are allowed to.

02What you get

A design subscription, run through the four phases described on the Process page. In plain terms:

• Unlimited requests and unlimited iterations for as long as your subscription is active.
• Deliverables and an update every week.
• Asynchronous working: written updates and shared files rather than standing meetings, in whichever written channel suits you.
• You set the priority. We work down your list in the order you put it in.
• No minimum term, and no notice period.

That is how it runs week to week: you keep a list, you decide what matters most, and we work through it and send you deliverables and an update every week. Where we think the order is wrong we will say so and tell you why (that recommendation is part of what you are paying for), but the decision is always yours.

“Unlimited” describes the list, not the throughput. You can put as many things on it as you like and take as many rounds on any of them as you need; what moves in a given week is what fits at the top of your order. So what we do not promise is a named deliverable on a named date. If a hard deadline matters, say so before you subscribe and we will tell you honestly whether it is realistic rather than find out together in week three.

There is nothing to renew and nothing to re-sign. As long as the work is landing and you are happy with it, the subscription simply continues month to month.

03What we do not take on

The subscription covers design, build and the AI work beside it. A few things sit outside it, and it is fairer to say so here than to let you find out in week one:

• Video as finished media: filming, editing and motion graphics.
• 3D modelling and rendering.
• Print production: packaging, and long-form print such as magazines, books, or anything that needs pre-press or InDesign.

Motion inside a screen is not on that list. Animation that is part of an interface is design work and is included; what is excluded is producing video and motion graphics as finished media.

Separately, we may decline a piece of work we would rather not put our name to. Adult content and partisan political campaigning are the usual examples, and there is deliberately no exhaustive list, because the judgement is the point. If it happens we will tell you why rather than quietly leave it at the bottom of the list.

If we decline the work you subscribed to have done, and that work was the reason you subscribed, email us and we will refund that month in full. Turning down what you have paid for and keeping the money is not a position we would want to defend.

04Paying

The price is $4,000 per month, charged in advance through Stripe. The first charge starts your first month; it renews automatically on the same day each month until you cancel.

If a payment fails, Stripe will retry it. Work pauses while an invoice is unpaid, and resumes when it clears. If we ever change the price it will not affect a month you have already paid for, and we will tell you at least 30 days before it applies to you.

Prices are in US dollars and exclude any sales tax, VAT or duty that applies where you are, which is yours to pay.

05Pausing, cancelling and ending

You can pause or cancel at any time from the billing portal, without asking us and without giving a reason. Cancelling stops the next charge and your subscription runs to the end of the month you have already paid for. Refunds are covered on their own page.

We can end the arrangement too, with 30 days' notice for any reason, or immediately if you do not pay, if you ask for something illegal, or if working together has become abusive. If we end it immediately for one of those reasons, you keep whatever has been delivered and paid for.

06What we need from you

Design work stalls on missing information more often than on anything else. So: give us the brief, the assets and the access we ask for, and come back on questions and reviews within a reasonable time. Work that is waiting on you is not work we can do.

Anything you hand us (copy, logos, photographs, fonts, data), you are confirming you have the right to give us and the right for us to use in your project. If that turns out not to be true and someone comes after us for it, that one is on you.

07Who owns the work

You do, once it is paid for. When the month a deliverable was made in has been paid in full, every right we hold in that deliverable passes to you, and you can use, change, sell or licence it however you like. You do not need our permission and there is no separate buy-out.

Three things sit outside that, and they are the normal three:

• We keep the right to show the work publicly (in a portfolio, a case study or a talk) and to say we made it. If a project is confidential, tell us and we will leave it out.
• We keep what we brought with us: our methods, our internal tools, and any component or template that existed before your project. You get a permanent, free right to use those inside what we made for you; you do not get to sell them on their own.
• Anything owned by someone else (typefaces, stock photography, open-source libraries, third-party services) stays owned by them and reaches you under their licence, not ours. We will tell you what those are.

Work from a month that has not been paid for stays ours until it has been.

08Confidentiality

Anything you share that is obviously not public (unreleased products, numbers, strategy, customer data) stays between us, and we will not repeat it or use it for anyone else. That holds after the subscription ends. It does not cover things that were already public, that we already knew, or that a court requires us to hand over.

The portfolio right above is subject to this one: if you have told us something is confidential, it is not going in a case study.

09How the work gets made

AI tools are part of how this studio works, which the home page says openly. Everything they produce is directed and reviewed by a person before it reaches you, and the responsibility for what we deliver is ours either way. If your organisation has rules about AI in supplier work, raise them before you subscribe rather than after.

10What we do and do not guarantee

We will do the work with the care and skill you would expect from a professional studio. What nobody can honestly guarantee is a result: that a design will lift a number, rank in a search engine, or make a product succeed. Those depend on your market, your product and a hundred things outside this arrangement, so beyond the promise of care and skill the work is provided as it is, without any other warranty.

11Limits on liability

If something goes wrong and it is our fault, what we owe you is capped at the total you paid us in the three months before the problem arose. Neither of us is liable to the other for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data or knock-on losses, however they happen.

Nothing here limits anything that cannot legally be limited, including liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else the law puts beyond an agreement's reach.

12Which law applies

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Utah, United States, and any dispute belongs in the courts there. If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

13Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you, we will email you at least 30 days before it applies, and you can cancel before it does. The date at the top of this page always says when it last changed.