Graphic Designers near you

Almost every design contains material the designer did not create. Typefaces are licensed software, and a licence bought by a design studio typically covers that studio's own workstations, not yours, and rarely covers every use automatically: embedding a font in a website, in an application, in a product or in an electronic document is often licensed separately from ordinary print use. Stock photographs and illustrations have their own terms, which can limit print runs, restrict use on merchandise for resale, exclude use as part of a logo or trademark, or forbid sublicensing to anyone else.

None of this is exotic, but it decides whether you can keep using a design. If the studio's licence covers the work and you later take the source files to another supplier, that supplier needs its own licence for the same fonts before it can open and edit the file properly. If a stock image licence does not permit trademark use and the image ends up inside a mark you intend to register, the problem surfaces at the worst possible moment.

So ask for a written list of every third-party element in the design, with the licence that covers it and any limits on print run, media, territory or duration, and ask who holds each licence. Where the business needs to use a typeface on its own website or in documents staff produce, buy the licence in the business's name rather than relying on the designer's. Converting type to outlines in final artwork solves the production problem, not the licensing one, because the licence still governs whether the design could be made that way at all.

The starting position is set by the Copyright Act: the author of a work is the first owner of copyright in it. A work made by an employee in the course of employment belongs to the employer in the absence of an agreement to the contrary, but a designer you commission is not your employee, and the old provision that treated commissioned portraits and photographs differently was repealed. Section 13(4) then requires that any assignment or grant be in writing signed by the owner of the right concerned. A paid invoice, a purchase order or an email saying the files are yours does not meet that requirement.

In practice there are three arrangements and they are genuinely different. A full assignment transfers copyright to you, so you can reprint, adapt and extend the work without asking. An exclusive licence leaves copyright with the designer but stops anyone else, including the designer, using the work for the licensed purposes. A non-exclusive licence simply permits your use, and a narrow one may cover a single print run of a single piece and nothing more. Any of the three can be reasonable; what causes trouble is assuming the first and having bought the third. Where a licence is used, check its duration, whether it covers media and territories you have not launched in yet, and whether you may modify the work or hand it to another designer.

Moral rights run alongside and cannot be assigned, though they can be waived in whole or in part, and assigning copyright does not by itself waive them. They include the right to the integrity of the work and the right to be associated with it as author, or to remain anonymous. For graphic design this comes up when artwork is later cropped, recoloured, overlaid with text or reused at a size it was never drawn for, and when a designer expects a credit on a published piece. Settle both points in writing: whether moral rights are waived, and whether attribution is required, expected or not wanted.

A one-off project suits a defined deliverable with a clear end: a logo, a set of packaging artwork, a brochure for a particular campaign. It should be scoped tightly, with the revision rounds, the file formats and the rights all specified at the start, because there is no ongoing relationship to absorb misunderstandings later.

Ongoing support suits businesses producing a steady flow of material, where the value lies in consistency and in not re-explaining the brand every time. It usually takes the form of a monthly arrangement or a block of hours, and it changes which terms matter: turnaround times, how work is requested and prioritised, whether unused time carries forward, and a standing rights arrangement that covers everything produced rather than a fresh assignment for each job. It also makes file management someone's actual responsibility, which is how a business avoids the slow drift into having four slightly different versions of its own logo in circulation.