Graphic Designers near you

The default under the Copyright Act 1968 is that the author of an artistic work owns copyright in it. Employment changes that: work made by an employee in the course of their job generally belongs to the employer. Commissioning a freelancer or a studio does not have the same effect, and only narrow categories of commissioned work, such as certain photographs and portraits taken for private or domestic purposes, sit differently.

That means a business that commissions a logo, a label or a brochure from an independent designer may hold nothing more than an implied licence to use it for the purpose it was commissioned for, unless the agreement says otherwise. Reusing it in a new medium years later is where the disagreement usually starts.

Fix it at the quote stage. Decide whether you are buying an assignment of copyright or a licence, and if a licence, what it covers: which media, which territories, how long, and whether you can modify the work. Assignments must be in writing to be effective, so a handshake and an invoice will not do it.

Moral rights under Part IX belong to the individual who created the work, not to a company, and they exist alongside copyright rather than inside it. The three rights are attribution of authorship, protection against false attribution, and integrity of authorship, which is about derogatory treatment of the work.

Because these rights sit with the person, an assignment of copyright does not sweep them up. The Act instead provides for the author to give written consent to specified acts or omissions that would otherwise infringe. A sensible Australian design agreement includes a moral rights consent clause dealing with attribution and with alterations the client may need to make.

In practice this rarely becomes a fight, but it matters when a client wants to crop, recolour or heavily modify a piece of work years later, or wants to use it without any credit in a context where credit would be expected. Raising it in the agreement costs nothing and removes the argument.

A good brief states the purpose, the audience, the format, the production method, the deadline and the mandatory elements. Designers who ask for that before quoting tend to be the ones who deliver on time.

Concepts come next, usually a small number of directions rather than a dozen, then refinement. Agree how many rounds of revision are included and what counts as a round, because unlimited revisions are either a fiction or an expensive surprise.

Production is the part clients undervalue. Files going to a commercial printer need the right colour space, bleed, trim marks, resolution and embedded or outlined type, and the printer's own specification should be obtained before artwork is finalised. Ask for a proof, and for large-format work ask for a physical proof rather than a screen preview.