Welcome to the most boring part of being a freelance designer — which is the business-y part of things.

And what’s an extremely important part of running a successful business ? having correct documents to protect yourself when things go south, because “unless it’s in writing it’s not legally binding.”

Many designers who work for small gigs here and there still don’t get their documents in place, which is understandable because it’s a small gig.

But what if …

• the client ghosts you after receiving the files and doesn’t pay you ?
• the client is a scope creep and keeps asking for more work than decided ?
• the client starts a legal dispute against you ?
• the client doesn’t want to work anymore with you because of your lack of professionalism ?

Well, all this has happened to me before (except the legal part) and thus I’m writing this article cause I got your back.

Documents you’ll NEED

These 5 documents are non-negotiable and if you want to land a great impression on a potential client, trust me you need them.

• Invoices: it is a document that outlines the goods or services provided by a business to a client, along with the amount due for payment.

• Overdue invoices: it is a payment request that has not been paid within the agreed-upon payment terms of an invoice.

• Contract: it is a legally binding agreement between two or more parties, setting out the terms and conditions of a freelance project.

• Project Proposals: it is a document that outlines the plan for a specific project, including its goals, timeline, budget, and expected outcomes and requires approval from the client before starting any work.

• Quotation: it is a document that provides a potential client with an estimate of the costs for your services, including a detailed breakdown of the prices for individual services, taxes and discounts etc.

Now that these are said and done, where are you supposed to get these documents ?

A good option is looking for apps or sites that generate such customized documents for you, but they are often paid.

Another option is to create these documents from scratch on Word or Excel or whatever app suits you, every time you have to send them to a client. Super tedious.

There’s one more option, which is to download random templates online and customize them as per your use.

But there’s a problem with it — they look very generic and lack a sense of continuity in their design.

Because you are mostly downloading them from random sources, they will have separate designs and it would look a bit unprofessional.

Especially cause you’re a designer and your documents having different layouts and fonts will strike OCD in you before your client.

The best solution to all these problems of having an all-in-one document workstation ?

Create your own templates.

Yeah I mean it, design them on your own. It’s not that difficult.

Once your templates are designed, you can keep working with them without worrying about spending too much time making them from scratch.

I am assuming that you understand Figma well, because now I’m going to show you my own process of making my own custom freelance document templates.

Designing document templates in Figma

Since we know the 5 required documents, now I’ll spend hours (20 mins max) in making a color scheme and exploring with typeface combinations.

One of my favorite color schemes ever is a light brown/yellow ochre-ish paired with a darker tone of blue-ish gray. So I went with that.

Once the main colors are sorted, I had to get to the typography. In my mind, I wanted something that showcases my brand as premium and modern.

I used a few pairings with Serifs + Sans Serifs but had to shift a bit because most of these didn’t have commercial licenses (yes, take licenses very seriously).

After a while I landed on Cyrene, but it didn’t spark the right emotion I was looking for.

Then I found LC Sac and it was also free for commercial use, jackpot.

I paired it with Euclid Circular A, even though I wanted Circular B but couldn’t find download links and this was the second best.

With the typography and colors sorted, I forgot the most important part of making any design look organized — the layout…

Now I had to scratch my head on this one because many elements such as the table of costs in the Invoice will be repeated across Overdue & Quotations as well.

I had to design the following, which are meant to be duplicated across —

• Table of costs
• To & from section
• Date section
• Payment info
• Footer greetings

After designing these, I had to arrange them according to the layouts I scribbled on my iPad.

Fixed certain elements, added auto-layout, changed type & colors according to my style guide, changed placeholder texts and I’m done.

The templates are finally ready and they look, minimal and fantastic. Exactly the vibe I like to give off with my designs.

From now on I can just drag and drop according to my future needs, and saved many hours of labor.

Free gift for y’all :)

If you guys have read so far then I’m not letting you leave empty handed.

These templates took a while to design and if you’re short on time then just download my Figma file for free — Download it here.

It’s free to use and forever yours to keep, ready to go and easily customizable according to your needs. Comes with an already created set of text and color styles to streamline your process even further.

Enjoy using it and keep all your legal requirements in place!

Hi there 👋🏻 I’m Sharanya — a freelance UI/UX designer writing about design here.

You can find me on Twitter, Dribbble & LinkedIn or reach out directly via email for freelance projects!