Do you own your logo?

So you have spent money with a designer / printing company / online marketing company to create a brand new logo and other design material company. It works great but you have decided that a new company offers you a better deal or you just want to create some of your own material and not have to pay them to do it so you ask for the source images, designs, fonts, etc. It’s that point you discover that you don’t actually ‘own’ everything you have paid for and find yourself either being chained to the original company or have pay the new one to recreate what you already have adding to your costs. So what questions do you ask to avoid getting into the situation in the first place.

Firstly let me say that I’m not a lawyer and what I’m writing about can not be used as any form of legal advice. This is more like a simple set of common sense questions you should be asking a company when you get them to design anything for you.

What am I paying for?

I know that might seem a stupid questions but I’ve had a few otherwise business savvy people get tripped up on that one. When you set up a contract with a design studio get them to spell out exactly what you are paying for. You may find that you are paying for their time to create the artwork but you are required by them to return exclusively to them for any changes or new material creation because they own all the source material used to create your work. Now for major work that is understandable, but when you just want to update a phone number on one person’s business card then you might be paying for a ‘couple of hours’ of design time for a few minutes of actual design work.

Do I have rights to take ‘my design’ somewhere else?

A  lot of the online web to print sites, where you can create your own printed items like business cards, have a free online design tool. This is great where you want create something quickly without paying for a designer. What you may not realise is these sites come with the requirement that you must print your creation with them and no one else. You will find that any proofs you are sent are limited quality or have big watermarks on them to make sure that you can’t take those to another printing company to print it after their costs providing fonts and artwork to use. Now keep in mind that this is perfectly reasonable – they have gone to the massive expense to provide the online design service, and it would be unfair to have you consume that for free but not use their paid service!  Even with a professional design company, read the fine print before you sign any contract as you may find that you are simply licensing the work from them and you don’t have rights to take it to someone else for future work.

Am I paying for the fonts/typefaces for my own use?

N ow you may think that fonts are free as most operating systems come with them and applications like Microsoft Office come with even more. In reality the fonts included are often paid for by the suppliers and you are paying a few dollars of the cost of the software for them. Ask your designer where they source the fonts from. If it’s not a free or open source font, and the designers are not including in them as part of the package, you may be in for an additional bill for hundreds of dollars US to buy them for your own use. You can ask the designer to chose an alternative typeface that is almost the same as the one originally chosen that has a lower/no cost to use and still get the same effect.

What stock images are being used, under what licence, and can I use them?

When creating marketing material a designer will often use ‘stock images’ which are commercially created artwork and drawings who copyright owner licences the use to other businesses. These licences vary depending on the creator and who supplies the stock image to designer but they all cover such things as number of impressions (times being printed), broadcast rights (where and how it can shown on TV or film),   modified or altered as part of a larger work (as sound sample of a music track) and so on. If you go beyond these limitations you may either have to pay for a more expensive version of that licence or be in a mess of legal trouble with the copyright holder. It can get even more interesting if the work is copy left, creative commons, or given as a royalty free licence, where the use in a commercial situation may be forbidden.   Generally speaking if you are small business it’s very unlikely you need anything but the standard one that most stock media suppliers use, but it doesn’t hurt to ask the designer about it. You also want to ask the designers for the unedited source files as part of the design package costs so you can use them yourself in your own material created in house.

What are the colours?

Again this might seem to be a silly question but it’s surprising how much trouble I go through trying to match colours when trying to recreate someone work. Now a Blue-Gray (C50M25Y00K20)   may look almost the same as Glaucous Blue (C47M29Y00K29) on a computer screen but the way the two colours are made up are different which can have different looks when printed on different types of material. Also most designers will work in Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK or Pantones but when you are creating something in Word, the colours are expressed as Red Green Blue. By getting them to supply a list of the colours used, in all three of the colour formats this means no matter who does the design/printing work the colours will always look the same (or as close as the technology allows).

Is it scaleable?

This one comes up more often when someone has their website designed first and then gets a company like ours at Copy Express to create other marketing material like business cards and flyers. The website company only thinks about what they are doing so designs it for the internet and it will look great. What we get is a bitmap that looks grainy in print or becomes so blocky and pixelated scaled up to a side of a van that it makes you look unprofessional and amateurish. Before you get anyone to design anything think about all the places you may have to use it and tell the designer you need it to work for these jobs. You need to do this because designers will only design for what they are paid for, and if you don’t ask for it you won’t get it. It may cost you more at the start but in the long term it will save you money and ensure that your all important logo works on everything.

Now at Copy Express you will avoid all these dramas when it comes to design. When you pay for us to design something, you are paying for our time to do it and you own the resulting product. We will supply any and all source material on request and can supply you from as just a folder containing what what was used, to a full ‘design bible’. We are more than happy to work on your behalf if an independent designer is needed to make sure that you get everything you need for your marketing material. If you want to find out more about our full range of services, book a meeting with us today.