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Freelance graphic design & image/font royalties
Lux
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
For the past 3 years, I've been doing graphic design as sort of a hobby/service at my college campus. I've made a lot of fliers, various programs, brochures, website images, t-shirts, banners and more. At some point I decided it would be nice if I got paid for this sort of thing.
I figure I could take up a job or two at craigslist, but the question that keeps bothering me is in regards to royalties to images & fonts used. What's the rule of thumb on this? I know I won't be using any images on deviantart, or any artists portfolio, but what about random images found through Google Image Search? How do I know when it's okay to use an image?
Also, how does one go about building an image library, besides taking your own pictures & buying them off of sites like iStockPhoto?
Finally, what about fonts? Can I assume all the fonts that come default on PCs are free to use? What about fonts on free font websites?
I figure I could take up a job or two at craigslist, but the question that keeps bothering me is in regards to royalties to images & fonts used. What's the rule of thumb on this? I know I won't be using any images on deviantart, or any artists portfolio, but what about random images found through Google Image Search? How do I know when it's okay to use an image?
Also, how does one go about building an image library, besides taking your own pictures & buying them off of sites like iStockPhoto?
Finally, what about fonts? Can I assume all the fonts that come default on PCs are free to use? What about fonts on free font websites?
Lux on
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Regarding fonts, system fonts are fine to use, but don’t ever use Arial, Papyrus, or Comic Sans for anything that isn’t supposed to look the menu of a discount Chinese buffet in Tijuana. The Windows Cleartype fonts (Constantia, Consola, Corbel, etc.) are great designs by some of the world’s best type designers. Macs come with a lot of great system fonts, too. And don’t forget about the pile of great fonts that you get with Adobe Creative Suite.
Fonts from free font websites are ok, but do yourself a favor and buy the expensive ones, they’ll make your work look better. Be careful, some free font sites are posting commercial fonts with the names altered. You can avoid this if you get the free fonts from Myfonts.com, DaFont.com, or directly from the font designers web sites.
That probably would be, unless the silhouette of the person (or even the pose they were standing in) was a major aspect of the original work (copyright infringement is notoriously grey when you get into the realms of imitation vs inspiration). There's nothing to stop you using other peoples work as inspiration or source references, but if it looks recognisably similar to the original in your eyes, there's a good chance it will to other people's eyes as well and that's good enough for a court to rule in favour of the original copyright holder.
Honestly though, iStockPhoto is so ridiculously cheap, if you need model references for silhouettes you might as well browse through there (there are batches of photos of things as simple as different human poses etc.), finding a suitable pose, buying the lowest res version available (which will probably cost the equivalent of 50 cents or something) and then using that to derive the required image. Part of the licence agreement for istock is being allowed to create derivative work from images you've bought so you've bought complete legal safety for the price of...does anything cost 50 cents these days?
Legally, you have no right to use someone else’s work without permission. How much you change it around is irrelevant. That said, I’ve never heard of anyone getting an invoice, or sued, for tracing a photo to use as a silhouette, but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to do it with an expensive image from a big stock vendor.
And Szechuanosaurus is right about the awesomeness of iStock. Sure 90% of iStock is shit, but clients who won’t pay for good photos don’t deserve better anyway. And some of those $5 stock illustration collections are pretty handy.
The thing to remember with iStock - and any stock photography really - is you have to work it. You could just download a pre-done illustration, slap on some text and call it job done but that's rubbish. Especially if you use their amateur photography with the ugly models. iStock serves as a decent base from which to create high quality visuals. If they still do the showcase gallery thing where designers and illustrators submit work created from images taken from iStock you can see what I mean.