Design assets and licensing

Designers assemble as much as they create. A landing page might combine a purchased theme, a stock photograph, an icon set, an illustration pack and two typefaces, each under different terms. SFIA describes graphic design as putting visual ideas to work on screen and in print, and in practice that means handling other people's work as routinely as your own. Getting the licensing right is part of the craft, not paperwork for somebody else.

Six questions before a file enters a design

A designer need not be a lawyer, but should be able to answer a short set of questions for every asset before it appears in work that leaves the studio.

• Who holds the licence? An asset bought on an agency account may not travel with the finished product to the client, which is why purchases for client work are better made in the client's own name.
• What kind of use is it? Advertising, packaging and goods for sale sit in different tiers from an article illustration or an internal slide.
• How many end products? Templates and many assets are licensed for one build, so a second site from the same files counts as a second purchase.
• Does the grant outlive the payment? Subscription downloads often lose their licence when the subscription lapses.
• Is the typeface cleared for this medium? Desktop, web, app and broadcast use are usually separate grants.
• Are people or property recognisable? Without releases, an image may be limited to editorial contexts.

Icons and illustration packs are the easiest assets to overlook, because they feel like interface furniture rather than media. They carry licences like any photograph: some demand attribution, some rule out use inside a logo or trademark, and a few restrict redistribution in open-source projects. Generated imagery adds a newer wrinkle. Several marketplaces now ask sellers to label it, and the cover a paid licence normally brings may not reach it, so record where it came from as carefully as any purchase.

The beginner's mistake is assuming that anything in a shared folder or a colleague's download history is cleared. The habit that prevents it is a simple register per project: what was used, where it came from, under which version of the terms, on what date. It turns a tense audit into a lookup. When a project needs material, the marketplaces we have reviewed are gathered under digital assets, and designers building for the browser will find the template side continued under web design. Illustrators and graphic designers meet the same question from the other direction whenever they license their own work to others, and a design system seeded from a bought kit inherits that kit's terms.