DESIGN ON THE DOTTED LINE

5 Essential Legal Considerations Every Graphic Designer Must Know

In the field of graphic design, there are no specific "laws" in the legal sense that apply uniquely to the practice, but there are legal principles and industry regulations that graphic designers must follow to protect their work and avoid infringement.

COPYRIGHT LAW

What it protects: Copyright law gives creators the exclusive right to use, distribute, and modify their original works, including designs, illustrations, and logos.

What this means for Designers: Graphic designers must ensure they do not use copyrighted images, fonts, or other materials without permission. Conversely, they should also protect their own work by registering it with copyright offices to assert their rights.

TRADEMARK LAW

What it protects: Trademarks protect brands, including names, slogans, logos, and other identifiers, ensuring that they are not confused with those of competitors.

What this means for Designers: When creating logos or branding elements, designers need to make sure that their designs do not infringe on existing trademarks. It’s also important to guide clients on registering trademarks for new brand identities.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (Ownership)

What it covers: When graphic designers work for clients, it's essential to define who owns the rights to the final design, any files and artwork and additional assets.

What this means for Designers: Contracts should clearly state whether the client gains full rights to the design or if the designer retains some rights. At MONOCROW, we retain the right to market ourselves using what has been created (additional plug for the client), however, we do not have the right to re-sell or re-distribute said designs.

licensing agreements

What it governs: Licensing dictates how a designer's work can be used by others.

What it means for Designers: If a designer creates a piece that is licensed for specific uses (like for one-time use in a campaign), the license must clearly define the terms. This prevents unauthorised reproduction, adaptation, or redistribution of the work.

FAIR USE DOCTRINE

What it allows: Fair use permits limited use of copyrighted material without permission for specific purposes like commentary, criticism, or parody.

What this means for Designers: Fair use can be a gray area, and designers should be cautious when incorporating third-party content. It's better to create original works or get explicit permission from the copyright holder.

IN CONCLUSION

Understanding these laws helps protect designers from legal disputes while ensuring they respect the rights of others in their creative process. This information is handy for clients and business owners in understanding their rights and the rights of creative material.

READY TO HAVE YOUR RIGHTS RESERVED?

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW

So, your business has had a website for the last few years that just doesn’t look good. It doesn’t perform the way you want it to. The site is dated, lacks function and doesn’t represent your brand or the direction it’s moving in. Looking at it makes you sad, imagining how much impact a well-made website could make and seeing your competitors generate leads that should be coming directly to you…

SOUND FAMILIAR?
HERE’S WHAT WE CAN DO.

Let’s sit down together and run a brief website audit. In doing so, we find out how your current site was built, if and where your domain exists and how to access your current website from an editing perspective.

Confused? We’d be surprised if you weren’t. We break it down into 3 easy steps in order to kickstart your website upgrade and seamlessly transition to a better looking and working website.

LET’S BREAK IT DOWN

WHAT TO ASK YOUR CURRENT WEB DEVELOPER:

In order to make informed decisions, we ask you to communicate with your current provider/ designer and gather some information that makes the transfer easy and seamless. Here is what to ask when preparing to move on or crossover to another platform.

• Website Hosting Details
  Q: Who is my provider and can you provide me access?
  Q: What type of plan am I on?
  Q: Are there any settings the new designer should be aware of?
  
  A: You will most likely be provided with a login for a host website (Shopify, Wix, Wordpress etc) or for a CMS (Content Management System). This looks like the back-end or ‘Dashboard’ for your website and is how it can be edited.
  

• Domain Ownership
  Q: Who owns the domain?
  Q: Where is it registered? (GoDaddy, Squarespace etc)
  Q: Can you provide login credentials for this domain?
  
  A: A domain is the URL that is purchased and placed on your website for people to search (for example www.monocrow.net). Knowing what you own and where it is kept will allow you to transfer this url from an old website to a new one and enable your new designer to manage it.
  
  If either of these are not accessible by you, you must request transfer of ownership or complete access in order to manage them successfully.
  

• Website Files and Backup
  Q: Can you provide or tell me where all current website assets are?
  Q: Are there any custom scripts, CSS or integrations I should know about?
  
  A: Knowing where the photography, video and assets are stored, will allow for smooth transition from one website to another. Knowing about any integrations, scripts, third party plug-ins and custom code will stop your new designer from accidentally breaking your website when trying to edit.
  

• SEO and Analytics
  Q: What strategies are currently in place for SEO?
  Q: What Analytics Tools are in use?
  
  A: Knowing what strategies are in place will allow your new designer to assess two things. The first, will be if the current strategies are performing and the second, how they can improve these strategies and implement those your previous designer may have missed.

WHERE TO NOW?

With this information, we sit down and discuss what you want from your upgrade or new build. We go over what wasn’t working and what you want to focus on with the revamp.

We fill out our brand questionnaire that identifies your messaging, market, competitors and business goals that are then used to strategically design your new website AND help you rank organically in your search engine.

WHAT IF I CAN’T GET THIS INFO

Salvaging as much information as possible will save you from further investment and is why it’s important for designers to equip clients with ALL the information. We equip all of our clients with basic editing skills and co-maintenance access as part of our service. You shouldn’t be left in the lurch once the design is complete.

By having access to your current website and domain via logins, we can do a lot of heavy lifting without having to re-invest. However, if we can’t access the current website’s editing platform and are unsure how to retrieve our domain - this is where it can be complex.

Without access to your old website:

• We have to start from scratch by crossing over to another platform. This means a new subscription and any other costs associated with switching over.
  
  You can plan for this by understanding when your old subscription runs out and make a smooth transition once it finishes. Without access it can be hard to stop subscriptions rolling over that you are no longer using.

Without access to your domain:

• We won’t be able to move or redirect your loved URL to a new website. This one is usually the biggest hit as business owners will have placed this URL on a lot of their paid marketing, print, social etc. Not having access means we choose a new domain which is different from the one on your current marketing.
  
  You can keep the old domain until you refresh your marketing and redirect anyone who visits to the brand new website and domain. This just takes time and can create a little bit of confusion amongst your clients and audience. However, the more domains you own work in your favour at the end of the day.

Without website files and assets:

• You will need to capture new content that can’t be salvaged from the old website. Not the end of the world and can inspire businesses to take a new direction and refresh thier whole look and feel.
  
  You can add photography and video capture by us to any web package for a discount!

STILL NEED A HAND?

Reach out to us and we can organise a more in-depth chat to explain these principles and even help liaise with your current web designer or developer. We’ll take care of the details while you plan for a brand new website launch.

ENQUIRE BELOW FOR AVAILABILITY

OPTIMISING OUR CLIENTS WITH SEO

HOW WE GET YOU TO APPEAR ORGANICALLY IN YOUR SEARCH ENGINE

At MONOCROW, we use a range of techniques to assist with the discoverability of your brand and insist that we tick all the available boxes organic strategies can tick before moving on to paid rank placement in your search engine.

Organic placement does take time, but whether you pay for Google Ads and Ranking or not, SEO optimisation and strategies are a must for successful launch and discovery foundations for your website.

We created this post to provide some further in-depth information on our techniques that we implement within client builds. Whilst this doesn’t touch on everything, it covers major ground in what is included and at what levels.

WHAT WE CREATE AND DESIGN WITH

Which platform we choose depends on your industry and requirements as a business as we believe some platforms do things better than others. For instance, we lean away from WordPress as it was initially intended as a blog platform similar to the Tumblr days. Whilst it has come a long way, we find it isn’t very user-friendly when clients want to manage their own platforms and make small changes.

For E-commerce related businesses we do prefer to design over on Shopify as they dominate in this space and offer a lot more tools and support in the selling of products and SaaS (Subscription) businesses.

However, our go-to for all service-based, creative or portfolio style business is definitely Squarespace. Studies have shown that businesses are moving towards low or no-code websites for ease of maintenance, lower running costs and successful conversions. We find Squarespace strikes the perfect balance of aesthetic and function.

SEO & SQUARESPACE

We also love it for its in-built functions which begin as the basis for our inclusions and the start of your website’s SEO journey. All sites include:

• Sitemaps - Squarespace sites come with an automatic XML sitemap. Your sitemap usually stays current and includes all URLs and metadata for SEO-friendly indexing.

• SSL Certificates - Squarespace offers free SSL certificates so site visitors have a secure connection for their entire visit. It’s also why your site will start with Https.

• Mobile-friendly - Responsive design. Meaning your content will automatically resize to fit various devices and screen widths which is crucial for Google Search.

• Clean HTML and URLs - HTML markup and URLs are indexed with ease.

• Robots.txt - This file is built for you, but can optionally block web crawlers.

Without explaining crawlers, essentially Google is able to search your website for attributes/words/functions and deem them appropriate for certain search results. Without these in place it can stop you from appearing at all.

ON-PAGE Optimisation - KEYWORDS & MORE

By collating potential consumer data, we’re able to utilise possible answers, content or information that they would be seeking via Google Search. This is known as keywords and on-page optimisation. This ensures organic foot traffic and when done correctly can be all you need to rank depending on your location and industry.

The way we do this successfully is by being aware of how smart search engine’s are becoming. Developments in technology can now decipher when content is considered disingenuous. In other words, it can tell when keywords are used for SEO purposes and when it is used authentically within your information. Google prefers quality content that provides value to the person searching.

• Keyword placement - We place your keyword data within different layers and levels of your site as part of on-page optimisation (titles, tags and metadata to name a few). We also consider accessibility which is becoming increasingly important and includes things like alternative text and specific structure of content. Making sure it is visually coherent, functional and adaptable.

• Internal Linking - is also utilised as a funnel for your website and for Google to assess your credibility as a search solution. The more websites we can have linked to your newest build, the better the result.

• Accessibility - By writing content that addresses searcher intent, we’re able to boost organic reach and put your website in front of more customers. We focus on quality over quantity with page numbers and ensure easy functionality whilst adhering to the aesthetics of your business or brand.

IMAGE QUALITY, load times AND MOBILE layout

SEO can also be influenced by your websites load time. A faster load time will not only keep customers engaged for longer but will see a better search result as Google deems the site more user-friendly. We ensure your images are of the highest quality without budging your load times.

Our favourite feature of our Squarespace sites is the option to design specifically for Desktop and Mobile. It provides two separate layouts to accomodate for phone and computer usage, allowing your site to look 100% on every device. This does mean we create two separate builds of every website we create in order for it to appear perfectly across desktop and mobile.

Google is progressively favouring sites that function well on mobile as it contributes to more than 60% of online traffic.

FURTHER STRATEGIES

Some more advanced and complex options that are dependent on the type of website and subscription are as follows - Highlighted is what we would recommend and what has seen result:

• Schema Markup - Is a type of code that can inform search engines about a page.

• Multilingual Website Tags

• Optimising for Google Voice Searches - Utilising lower page speeds and content that would respond to a voice search with the focus on user-intent.

• Building Custom 404

• Submit your Sitemap to Google - AKA Sign-up for Google Console and Google Analytics.
  This helps verify your website and other profiles such as Google Business.

• From here we would advise professional paid ad assistance.

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