The licence categories nobody reads

The licence you did not read

Two categories of material pass through nearly every creative project (typefaces and stock assets) and both are licensed rather than sold. The licence terms are where the trouble lives, and the trouble usually surfaces long after delivery, when the client has spent money on production.

Font licensing, by category

A typeface purchase is not a purchase of the typeface. It is a licence for specific uses, and the categories are separate products from most foundries.

Desktop. Install on a stated number of computers, use in documents and artwork, output to print and to flat images. This is what people think they bought.

Web. Serve the font files to browsers, usually priced by page views or as a separate perpetual fee. A desktop licence does not include this, and using a desktop font file as a webfont is the single most common font licence breach in the trade.

App and embedding. Bundling the font inside an application or an e-book. Separate again, and often expensive.

Broadcast, logo and merchandise. Some foundries restrict use in a logo or require an additional licence for a mark that will be trade marked. Check before you build an identity on a face, because discovering it afterwards means redrawing.

Seats and impressions. Desktop licences commonly cover a number of computers. If you hand files to a client’s team of six, their team needs their own licence.

The practical consequence for a freelancer: you cannot pass your font licence to a client. Your licence covers you. Outline the type in final print artwork so the file does not need the font, tell the client which faces are used and what licences they will need, and raise the cost at the kickoff rather than the handover.

The free path for type, which is good

Open licensed typefaces are not a compromise any more. Google Fonts and the SIL Open Font Library hold faces under the SIL Open Font License, which permits use, embedding, webfont serving, modification and redistribution at no cost, with essentially one condition: the fonts themselves may not be sold on their own, and modified versions carry naming requirements.

For a small business that will never pay a foundry, specifying an open face is better professional practice than specifying a commercial one they will end up using without a licence. It is also the honest option for any client whose team needs to produce material themselves.

Check the specific licence rather than assuming. Not everything free is open licensed: free-for-personal-use fonts exist in large numbers on download sites, and using one commercially is a breach that foundries do pursue, because it is easy to detect in a published PDF.

Stock images and the tiers

Royalty-free does not mean free. It means a one-time fee for broad ongoing use within stated limits, and there are always limits: print run caps, restrictions on merchandise or resale, no use in a logo or trade mark, no use suggesting endorsement, and restrictions on sensitive contexts.

Rights-managed licences a specific use: medium, territory, term, size, exclusivity. More expensive, more precise, and it is how you buy exclusivity.

Editorial use only is the one that causes real damage. Images marked editorial usually lack model or property releases and may not be used in advertising, packaging or anything promotional. They are common in search results, they look like ordinary photographs, and using one on a client’s packaging is a genuine liability.

The restrictions that most often bite in commercial work: no use in a logo or trade mark, no use as the primary element on merchandise for resale, and print-run ceilings.

Free image sources, with the real caveats

Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay offer large libraries under permissive terms. They are useful and there are three caveats worth knowing.

The licence covers the photographer’s copyright and does not grant you rights in anything depicted: recognisable people, private property, artwork on a wall, a branded product, a building with its own protections. A photograph of a person from a free library with no model release is not safe for advertising, whatever the site’s licence says.

Terms change. Several of these platforms have revised their licences over the years, and the terms that applied when an image was downloaded may not be the ones in force now. Keep a record: the source, the image ID, the licence text as it stood, and the date.

And ubiquity has a cost of its own: the popular images appear on thousands of sites, which is a brand problem rather than a legal one, but a real one for a client trying to look distinct.

Creative Commons material needs the specific variant checked. CC0 is effectively unrestricted. CC BY requires attribution in a specified form. CC BY-NC prohibits commercial use, which rules out most client work. CC BY-SA requires derivative works to carry the same licence, which can be a serious problem in a commercial context.

Keeping the record

For every licensed asset in a project: source, licence type, licence number or receipt, date, and what it covers. One row in the project’s spreadsheet.

The reason is specific. Stock agencies and font foundries do conduct compliance checks, and a demand letter arrives years later, addressed to the client, who forwards it to you. At that point the only thing that matters is whether you can produce the licence. If you can, it is a ten-minute matter. If you cannot, it becomes an expensive one, and the contract usually says it is yours.

Tell the client which assets are licensed and what the limits are, in the handover note. When they later use the packaging photograph on a billboard, you want that conversation to start from a document rather than from memory.

The limitation

None of this is uniform. Font licences differ foundry by foundry and some are unusually restrictive in ways no general rule predicts. Stock terms differ by agency and change over time. Copyright rules for images of people, buildings and artworks vary sharply by country: freedom of panorama, which governs photographing buildings and public sculpture, exists in some countries and not in others for the same building.

The workable habit is not to memorise the rules but to read the specific licence for the specific asset, save it with the project, and quote for the licences the client will need before you design something that depends on one.