NDA Policies and your Creative Rights

Have you ever had a Non Disclosure Agreement or something similar? Why do companies put a tight restrictions on products and why should our creative showcase suffer it.

So lets do a quick intro for newbies. Definitely if you are opportune to work in a well structure organisation you definitely must have signed a similar contract. What exactly are NDAs

To maintain a competitive advantage, businesses must keep working projects, innovative ideas, or exciting new products secret lest they fall into the hands of a competitor. Similarly, startup companies with a new and profitable idea can only succeed if what they are working on remains under wraps. A non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, is a legal document that keeps the lid on such sensitive information. These agreements may be referred to alternatively as confidentiality agreements (CA), confidentiality statements, or confidentiality clauses, within a larger legal document.

How Non-Disclosure Agreements Work

An NDA is typically put to use any time that confidential information is disclosed to potential investors, creditors, employees, advisors, clients, or suppliers or any other stakeholders that need access to the company's confidential information. Having confidentiality in writing and signed by all parties can lend trust to these sorts of negotiations and deter theft of intellectual property. The exact nature of the confidential information will be spelled out in the non-disclosure agreement. Some NDAs will bind a person to secrecy for an indefinite period of time

Creative Secrecy and the Escape

Imagine you just finished a project with complex business requirements, user needs, data, and user research and achieved great results. After that success, you’re now looking for your next challenge. You can’t wait to talk about your design process and success to potential clients/employers! Not so quick. Remember that document you signed before you joined, called NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement)? This contract prohibits you from disclosing any proprietary information, technical data, trade secrets or know-how, including but not limited to, technology, designs, research, product plans, products, services, customers, markets, software, marketing or other business information…So pretty much everything.
Now you have a glimpse of what this magic spell documents are, we can say they can be pretty annoying for our creativity showcase especially for freelancers and contract stakeholders. Lawyers are very smart and they try to keep you at bay with so many ambiguous words and crafty sentences to keep you in secrecy. You do a great Job with a handsome pay and so much creativity you are busting to let the whole world see and appreciate your awesomeness and you wondering a deal is a deal. How do i escape this creativity showcase blocker. Time, most NDAs are time bound but are you willing to stick to that time frame. Definetly you were paid for your work and you signed that deal.
This is a maze carefully built by the best of the best. So i am going to be giving some tips on how to escape this Maze without breaking your contract.

Lets escape the maze without breaking a sweat!!

we are going to brush through this spell breakers together as this is a problem you and i face unless you are not bothered about your creative showcase.

• 1. Ask for Permission or Testimonials

  Yes this is the most easy way to escape this maze. What best means to escape a maze than to ask the creators. However make sure you have a signed permission clause to save you from future allegations and misunderstandings.

• 2. Redact confidential information

  My best trick so far. However this works for weaker contacts and agreeements. When you publish work with redacted info without company’s consent or knowledge, they may be okay with it or unhappy. However, this company cannot prove that they are indeed this company because they will be the party to give away this confidential information, not you. you can redact information by blurring logos and replacing real data with fake one.

  Wouldn’t it be weird to go to an interview with a portfolio which logo is blurred and they can’t know the company name?

• 3. Create a case study or a blog post

  This can be tricky because you need to hit the nail on the head without using a hammer. Sounds weird right?
  Well its quite simple write about your experiences working on your NDA protected projects and give little or no information without bridging or faulting your contract policies.

• 4. Avoiding tricky NDAs in the first place

  Now this is the best part. Always set your terms to favour you in any possible way. Learn to renegotiate without to a fair scale. Raise your rates to cover the potential loss of not being able to talk about the project. Work for companies that have a transparent approach to sharing design processes. As a community, we need to encourage companies to be more transparent about sharing the know-how.

So Welcome to the world of NDAs. I too share your frustration and i still fall for tricky NDAs. As a designer one thing you should never forget is YOU DESIGN TO SOLVE PROBLEMS. Keep up the good work and let your creativity speak wonders.