A method of contact lithography includes predicting distortions likely to occur in transferring a pattern from a mold to a substrate during a contact lithography process; and modifying the mold to compensate for the distortions. A contact lithography system includes a design subsystem configured to generate data describing a lithography pattern; an analysis subsystem configured to identify one or more distortions likely to occur when using a mold created from the data; and a mold modification subsystem configured to modify the data to compensate for the one or more distortions identified by the analysis subsystem.