Unit 9 | The Working Designer: Copyright, Assets & Export

Introduction

Unit 9 is the course’s final content unit before Unit 10’s ACP review window. It shifts from making artwork to delivering it like a working designer would, closing with a full client brand project delivered as a packaged, exported handoff.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:

Judge what’s legally safe to use, including AI-generated content
Package a finished project for client handoff
Place and link external assets correctly
Export artwork correctly for screen and print

Calendar of Events for This Unit

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
3/15	3/16	3/17	3/18	3/19
S \| 8	S \| 8	S \| 8	F \| 9.1	F \| 9.1
3/22	3/23	3/24	3/25	3/26
F \| 9.2	F \| 9.2	F \| 9.3	Conferences	Good Friday
4/5	4/6	4/7	4/8	4/9
F \| 9.3	F \| 9.4	F \| 9.4	S \| 9	S \| 9
4/9: Report Card grades open in Infinite Campus (MP3); 4/9: Report Card grade verification window opens (through 4/23)
4/12	4/13	4/14	4/15	4/16
S \| 9	S \| 9	S \| 9	S \| 9	S \| 9
4/15: By 4/15: Post Test

Lessons

Unit Vocabulary

Copyright: Automatic legal protection, granted the moment an original work is fixed in a tangible form (saved, drawn, written), giving the creator exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, and adapt their work.
Intellectual Property: Creations of the mind, designs, writing, logos, code, artwork, that the law treats as ownable property, protected through copyright, trademark, or patent depending on the type of work.
Derivative Work: A new work based on or adapted from an existing copyrighted work (a redrawn logo, a remixed illustration). Creating one generally requires the original copyright holder’s permission, even if the new version looks quite different from the source.
Commercial Use: Using a work to make money or promote a business, as opposed to personal or educational use. Many “free” assets are licensed for personal use only and require a separate, often paid, commercial license.
Attribution: Publicly crediting the original creator of a work, usually required as a condition of a specific license (for example, a Creative Commons BY license) even when the work is otherwise free to use.
Work for Hire: Work created by an employee within the scope of their job, or by a contractor under a signed work-for-hire agreement. The employer or client, not the person who actually made it, legally owns the copyright.
Usage Rights: The specific permissions a license grants for how a work may be used: where, for how long, in what medium, and for what purpose. Separate from who owns the copyright itself.
Fair Use: A U.S. legal doctrine allowing limited, unlicensed use of copyrighted material for purposes like commentary, criticism, education, or parody. It’s decided case-by-case, not by a fixed rule of thumb like “under 30 seconds is always fine,” using four factors: purpose of the use, nature of the original work, how much was used, and the effect on the original’s market.
Fair Dealing: The equivalent doctrine to fair use in the UK, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries. Narrower than U.S. fair use, since it only applies to a specific, enumerated list of purposes (research, criticism, news reporting) rather than an open four-factor test.
Public Domain: Works with no active copyright protection, either because it expired, the work was never eligible, or the creator deliberately released it (for example, marked CC0). Anyone can use a public-domain work for any purpose without permission or credit.
Stock Images: Professionally produced photos or illustrations licensed for reuse. “Royalty-free” means one payment covers many uses. It does not mean free of cost or free of restriction, so always check what the specific license actually permits.
AI-Generated Content: Images, text, or other media produced by a generative AI tool from a prompt. Copyright ownership of AI-generated content is legally unsettled and varies by platform terms of service and by jurisdiction. As of this writing, the U.S. Copyright Office holds that purely AI-generated output, without meaningful human creative authorship, cannot be copyrighted at all, which matters when a client expects to own a deliverable exclusively.
Restricted Font: A licensed font whose terms don’t allow its files to be shared or redistributed with a client or another designer, even inside a project package. Illustrator’s Package feature flags these separately from fonts that are safe to include.
Model Release / Location Release: A signed legal document in which a photographed person (model release) or property owner (location release) grants permission for their likeness or location to be used in a commercial project. Required before using a photo containing an identifiable person or a distinctive private location commercially, regardless of who holds the photo’s copyright.
File Package: The folder Illustrator’s File > Package command builds automatically, containing a copy of the document, every linked asset, every font used (where licensing allows), and a summary report. The standard way to hand a project off to a client or another designer without broken links or missing fonts.
Embedding: Placing a raster image into an Illustrator file so its full pixel data is copied directly into the document. The file grows larger, but it never breaks if the original image moves or is deleted.
Linking: Placing a raster image as a reference to an external file, which Illustrator displays at preview resolution but doesn’t copy into the document. Keeps the .ai file small, but the link breaks (“missing”) if the original file moves, is renamed, or is deleted.
Edit Original: A command, available on both linked and embedded images, that reopens the original image file in its source application (for example, Photoshop) for editing. Save the change there, and the Links panel shows the placed image updated automatically.
Asset Export Panel: A panel (Window > Asset Export) for collecting objects or artboards you’ll export repeatedly, then batch-exporting all of them at once, each at multiple scales and formats in a single click.
Use Artboards: An option in Illustrator’s export dialogs that exports each artboard in the document as its own separate file, using the artboard’s name in the file name. The standard way to export a multi-artboard document (a sticker sheet, a set of icons) without manually exporting each one.