I am designing a logo for a friend. I have the font and colors done. All I need is an icon for it. I found a vector on shutterstock that would be perfect. I took the vector and used it as a base and re-designed it so it's completely different from the original. Should i be worried about copyright and licencing.
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My company bought  and wants to trademark it by adding some words with different colors.   Do you know anything about if this is legal since we purchase the vector art?
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I have this logo with two ellipses and multiple line segments.    The ellipses have 5pt strokes on them, no fill and the line segments are 3 pt, no fill. I placed the .ai file into another file and tried to resize it down to fit a business card, only to come upon this:    Now the shapes look like they have twice the stroke that they had before. Thanks in advance for any help!
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It sometimes arise that I need to use, for an article, a book chapter or any other written work, figures that I have already published (not figures published by others). These are usually schematic figures explaining what a chemical or physical system look like, how an algorithm works, etc. Thus, instead of reusing the exact same figure, I can easily create another one, conveying the same message with (more or less subtle) differences in presentation.  However, I have no idea how to answer the following question: how different need two figures be to avoid the second one infringing on the copyright of the first? What is a good rule of thumb to be used? Is it enough to change one of the following:   color scheme viewpoint of a 3D visualization moving around blocks in a 2D diagram (or mind map) changing axis properties (labels, tick mark positions, etc.) in a graph
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I am looking for good websites providing royalty free stock images for pay.  I'm not looking for sites that make images available for free and require attribution or non-commercial use; they're already covered in .  I'd also like hear some comments of the service:   What kind of payment options they offer?   e.g. do you have to buy a bulk of credits or can items be bought separately? Sometimes buying bulk credits won't suit my projects.  How much do they have content?   e.g.  is interesting  for its payment options, but I found its supply lacking.  How is the overall content quality?   e.g. does the site have vast disperse in quality, which usually is the case with big, major sites (such as  or does the site have strict quality requirements?    What sites do you use to buy graphics / backgrounds / images for commercial design purposes?
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I am writing an article comparing three pieces of software. I have taken screen shots of all of them and would like to use them in a non-open access article. Given the intended journal, there is a reasonable chance of the images being on the cover. What are the copyright issues associated with screen shots?  Specifically, one of the pieces of software is free and open source (GPL v2), and two are free as in beer, but closed source with unknown licenses and no EULAs. To further complicate matters one of the closed sourced pieces of software looks and functions very much like a proprietary piece of hardware produced by a massive company. Three years ago I contacted the developer of the software and asked about using a screen shot and he said it was fine. The software is still widely available, but the direct download from the developers site now has text indicating that the massive company has "requested" that it be taken down. I own the physical hardware and am not aware of any crazy licensing restrictions. I could use a photo of the physical hardware if that is better.
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I'm sure this is a common problem, but I haven't found an efficient solution yet.  I've created a 4 color logo and I want to create a few versions of it with different colors for use on different backgrounds. I'd love to be able to use the same symbol as much as possible.  My natural inclination is to duplicate the symbol over a number of artboards in the same file, and have a different color scheme in each artboard, but it seems like I need to break the symbol to accomplish this.  My assumption is that there's no quick solution to this, but is there a common workflow that keeps things more-or-less linked and organized?
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To show the client what the finished design will look like on the actual product (brochure, business card, envelope etc.)  How do you create branding/packaging images like the ones below.  Until recently I always thought these images were photographed but looking at it closer I've realized the designs and logo are all computerized.  how do I get it to look like this and where can I get the original packaging from? further more how would I get something with typography to look 3 dimensional on piece of paper?  Would it just be easier to spend money and get it photographed?
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I'm not a fan of allowing any outside logos into an app but it is a Client requirement. The requirement is that a user can upload their logo and it will replace the app logo in a space that is 120px - 160px width. There are several problems to try to prevent when allowing the user to upload a logo:   poor quality image that is pixelated when uploaded wrong size image that will be distorted when displayed unvectored text in logo font images ( which can't be prevented ) wrong aspect ratio logos   I'd like to know what the best parameters to set for an uploaded logo.  We can do a check with the code for the px width and height. But the code can not check if the text has been vectorized.  Any insights would be nice in this problem. Thanks in advance.
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This is a legal question and I want to know if I can continue the way I work in a commercial environment. This is not about if I can blatantly take images from the web and use them as they are.  What I do is mostly icons and iconographic imagery where in the end no one can tell if I used an image that doesn't belong to me as a starting point.  Here is an example.    See, technically I stole.  I'd like to know if this is perfectly okay and counts as a new work or if it's sort-of okay because I might not get into legal trouble. Or maybe I should be really careful.  I actually don't know.
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I'm designing a logo inspired by the .   My logo (inside the green zone) has nothing to do with the "dinosaur" logo of Mozilla. So the question is about the frame and the arrangement of the letters (IJK in my case).  Is it plagiarism if my logo looks similar to an existing one?
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I have a few payment brand images that need to go in the footer of a website, the footer is very dark grey, to the point where making the logos grey-scale wouldn't be much of a good idea, especially as we still need the logos to stand out.  For example I took the following logo:   And changed it to fit with our very dominant red theme:    Is this good in terms of the user's perspective? Is this legal or misrepresenting the brand? If so is completely changing a logo to white acceptable for dark backgrounds?
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What happens if a user uses a copyright image as a profile image on SO or any other site?  Is it ok to use such images because according to law it is illegal to use anything which has a copyright?  My question is just related with User Profiles on SO not other social media sites.  If a copyright issue is occurred then who is responsible for it?
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I'm creating the UI for a web application which will mainly run on Macs. So my goal is to preserve the look and feel of Mac OS. But since I don't use Apples Frameworks I'm not allowed to use their UI design. So my question is: how closely am I allowed to copy their design without violating copyrights?  Do you think this is still legitimate?
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I know Google image search is not a free-for-all to grab any image needed. However, many, many, many clients don't grasp this concept and often request or send images they'd like to use in a design or product which are clearly a violation of copyrights.   I recently had a client send an image to me which, frankly, seemed too well done and too specific for the client to be sending. My thought was, based on the clients business, it was doubtful they paid someone to create the illustration depicted in the image the sent.  So, I did a little reverse Google image searching and found the original, which actually won an award for illustration a few years ago. I immediately knew the image was a violation of copyrights and threw it away. I expressed the violation to the client only to be met with "Do a Google image search for 'XXX XXX XXX' and you'll see everyone is using it. Please use the image."  When designing a piece and a client requests the use of an image they "found", and it is clear it's a violation of copyrights, what should a designer do?  I realize this is a legal question but... Can the designer include a clause in a contract to protect themselves from liability due to these requests? Is this effective?  In some cases, clients are fully aware that they may be infringing. However, in their words... "The worse that can happen is we get a 'cease and desist' letter. We'll remove it then." My ethics cringe at this. How should this be approached?
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My wife recently got a logo designed for her new business, by a professional branding company. It went through several stages of approval, getting the logo just right, however, when she went on to the next stage of the process (creating the social media pages) she was asked to find some stock images to use for the banners.  While doing so, she found her "logo" was taken exactly from an existing stock image. The only modification done was to add a little bit of color and her business name.    I don't know the proper etiquette for this situation is. Is it bad that her logo is a stock image and if so, is it too late in the process to request a change (note they claim to allow unlimited revisions but I'm not sure if that applies once we "accept" the design).  Stock Image:   Logo:
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I got a couple of questions about game trademarks.   When should I submit a trademark for my game if I see that this is a serious project? Where do I submit a trademark request? Does it have to be local (In my country)? What do I need to be ready to submit a trademark request?   Thanks!
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I've been looking into using the Ubuntu typeface for a logo.  The logo is for a web site unrelated to ubuntu and open source software.  I'm wondering whether the license allows this, and if so, whether there are any limitations?