You asked your legal, copyright and trademark questions, and Jean has answered! All questions are taken from comments posted on the original ‘Ask Jean’ post. We invite you to ask more questions.

Hi Jean!

I run a Creative Services department in a large corporation. I am creating a brochure for a tradeshow. In this brochure is a 30 year timeline showing events in the industry, company milestones and cultural fads. As part of this timeline I wanted to include images of specific products including a Rubick’s Cube, a Viewmaster, Etch-a-sketch and an iPod or iPhone. I have not seen stock photography of these objects. I was going to have a photo shoot so I have original photography we own. Read the rest of this entry »

I take most taglines with a grain of salt, but when MOO says “We love to print” I think they really mean it.

The MOO website, moo.com, is as fun as the products they print.]

Many designers have a love/hate relationship with printing. Print materials can look so amazing, and are so essential to promotion, but can be a real challenge to put together. Isn’t it time you had a little more fun with your print work? Read the rest of this entry »

Flash designers and Flash developers are often the same person. Why? It’s mainly because Flash has proven such a popular success and because it breathes interactive life into lightweight, great looking artwork—or, looking at it from the other side, that it spiffs up programming projects so well from a visual standpoint. The platform really serves as a blend of the disciplines of design and development, and, in light of this tendency, Jen deHaan (Adobe documentation doyenne, among other talents) has dubbed this special hybrid a Flash “deseloper,” which gives deselopers the world over an apt title. This is useful, for sure; however, the advent of Flash CS3 makes things a bit more interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

You asked your legal, copyright and trademark questions, and Jean has answered! All questions are taken from comments posted on the original ‘Ask Jean’ post. We invite you to ask more questions.

Hi Jean,

Great site! If you design a stationary system for a client and take your files to the printer, and the client in turn pays the printer for the work but does not pay your bill (the designer) in full, do you have a right to refuse to let the printer reprint any of the work until you get paid in full? Read the rest of this entry »

Jean Perwin

Jean Perwin is a Miami based attorney who specializes in Intellectual Property Law, Entertainment and General Corporate Law. She is most recently a recurring author for Notes on Design, and has a just launched a new series of informational posts to answer all your burning trademark/copyright questions. For those unfamiliar with the genius of Jean, we asked her ten questions ranging from the widest-held copyright hooey to the reason she likes working with people like you. Read the rest of this entry »

How many times have you started a web page design from a Photoshop PSD mockup? Or needed to revise an image in Photoshop after it was part of your web layout? Dreamweaver CS3’s integration with Photoshop makes these common tasks much quicker.

Start off by opening a page in Dreamweaver and opening an image in Photoshop, even a layered PSD (note that all of these techniques work in Fireworks too—it’s your choice!). Make a rectangular marquee selection of the part of the image you want to bring into your web page. Don’t worry if it’s not the size, format, or optimization level you ultimately want, just press Command-C (Ctrl-C on a PC) to copy it (or go to Edit > Copy Merged if the file is layered).

Now, position your cursor in your Dreamweaver document, right where you want the image to go—a div container, a table cell, whatever you like—and paste (Command/Ctrl-V).

Copying from Photoshop and pasting to Dreamweaver brings you to the Image Preview dialog.
Read the rest of this entry »

You asked your legal, copyright and trademark questions, and Jean has answered! All questions are taken from comments posted on the original ‘Ask Jean’ post. We invite you to ask more questions.

Hi Jean,

As I’m designing corporate training classes I often have topics where it would be instructive to show brief excerpts from movies. Read the rest of this entry »

I spend over 75% of my workday in Flash, and it’s time I really do enjoy. If I’m not coding up a custom MP3 player, I’m designing character models for an interactive mascot or working out the navigation for a corporate slideshow. Heck, I even do video work in Flash, often using the main timeline and manual tweens to export animation for use in title sequences and interstitials that don’t end up anywhere near the Web. With each new release, Flash keeps getting better; but as much as I value the authoring environment, I’m quick to grant it doesn’t do everything I need.

Over the years, I’ve gathered a handful of free 3rd party tools that I use so often, I find myself shocked when reaching for them on a friend’s computer and—poof!—they’re not there. Read the rest of this entry »

Chocolate promos?

Besides business card and letterhead, have you ever created any kind of promotional mailer piece for yourself as a designer? So much emphasis has been placed on the online portfolio of late that I feel physical, tangible methods of self-promotion have fallen by the wayside among designers entering the industry today. But that’s exactly why a well-done mailer can catch people’s attention. Read the rest of this entry »

You asked your legal, copyright and trademark questions, and Jean has answered! All questions are taken from comments posted on the original ‘Ask Jean’ post. We invite you to ask more questions.

Hello Jean,

So nice to hear that you are doing this. I am new to the field and my first question is: On all sites you see the copyright symbol. Who is responsible for obtaining the copyright on a website, and how does one go about getting this done? Also, when I design a label or do artwork for a client, and he/she pays me for the job, who is the rightful owner of the work? Read the rest of this entry »