Design guides

Using free assets commercially

What the licenses on free fonts, icons, photos, video, music, 3D models and templates actually allow in client and product work, and how to keep proof of it.

Copyright, trademark and ownership for creators

The other side of licensing: who owns the work you make, how to register it with the U.S. Copyright Office, how a logo is protected as a trademark and what a USPTO filing costs, how Creative Commons terms work when you publish or reuse, and what to do when your design is copied. General information, not legal advice.

Print production and export

Getting screen designs onto paper without surprises: color conversion and ink limits, bleed and safe areas, PDF/X export, and the resolution a print size really needs.

Typography

Choosing, pairing, sizing and shipping type: scales, variable fonts, display faces, font file formats, and fixing web fonts that fail to load.

Color and accessibility

Color that works for every reader: harmony and palette building, WCAG contrast, chart palettes, dark mode, and the accessibility criteria designers own.

File formats, web assets and UI

Formats, responsive images, SVG, favicons, CSS units and animation: the decisions that decide how fast and how sharp a design looks once it is built, plus the vector formats (AI, EPS, SVG, PDF) you hand to printers, developers and clients.

Design systems, UI and brand

Building and choosing systems: tokens and components, UI kits, icons, brand style guides, landing pages, mockups and social formats.

Brand delivery and freelance business

The working side of design: contracts, scope and revisions, who owns the finished files, what the tools you rely on let you hand to clients, and how a studio of one avoids disputes. Every guide here reads the primary source, whether that is a statute, a Copyright Office circular or a vendor's own terms, and shows the date it was checked. The topics sit between the craft guides and the legal ones. A logo is not finished when the artwork is approved: the client needs the right files, the right licences for the fonts and stock inside them, and a written transfer of rights that the law will recognise. A freelancer needs a contract that defines a revision, prices a cancellation and says what the portfolio may show. These pages cover those decisions clause by clause and file by file, with blanks and questions where the right number depends on your market. They are general information, not legal advice, and each links back to the licensing and copyright guides for the detail behind it.

Design software: cost, terms and free alternatives

What the tools you design in cost, what their licences let you do with client work, and what to check before you move a studio onto, or off, a subscription. The guides in this group read the licence text itself: the Affinity Terms and the Canva Terms of Use behind a free professional app, Canva's Content License Agreement for the assets inside its editor, and Adobe's font terms for what a freelancer may hand to a client. They show the date each document was read, quote the clauses that matter to a working designer, and say plainly when a page could not be opened or a feature could not be tested. Free software is not the same as unrestricted software, and a subscription is not the same as a licence to everything it ships with. These pages sort those differences into decisions: who may use the app, what you own when you export, what stops working if an account closes, and what a team needs that an individual does not. They are general information about software terms, not legal advice, and terms change, so each guide tells you what to re-check and when. The Affinity guide is the starting point.

Selling designs: merch, print on demand and fan art

Selling what you make, whether it is fan art, a T-shirt line or a print-on-demand shop, raises copyright, trademark and platform-policy questions all at once. These guides separate the layers: what copyright protects in a character, where trademark takes over for names and logos, what a platform such as Redbubble or Printify will remove whatever a court might eventually decide, and which fonts, images and graphics you can put on a shirt or a mug without a licence problem. Each one reads the statute, the Supreme Court opinion or the platform's own help page, shows the date it was read, and says when a page could not be opened. They are general information about United States law for sellers and designers, not legal advice, and none of them promises that a particular design is safe. Start with the fan art guide, which sets out a decision tree for a single design and a table of what each platform says, then follow its links to the licensing, Creative Commons and takedown guides when the question is about one element, such as a font, a texture or an AI-generated image.

AI design prompting

Prompting image and UI models the practical way: weak prompts beside fixed ones, for logos, interfaces and product photography.

The AI design prompting series page collects these tutorials in reading order.