Copyrights: What’s the real deal? – Part I of II

Every digitizer and embroiderer faces this from time to time. Let’s talk about copyright. Do we or don’t we digitize or produce a design we know doesn’t belong to the person asking for it? The correct answer is “no”.

Webster’s defines copyright as: the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of something (as a literary, musical, or artistic work).

Simply put, if your customer isn’t either the owner or a rep for the company or a promotional products rep slated to procure swag for them, the design they’re bringing you falls under copyright law and you shouldn’t be doing it. There are a few exceptions, but the bottom line is; if they don’t own the design, they have no right to use it and it is illegal for you to recreate it or produce it.

This comes up frequently with regard to sports teams, car and motorcycle manufacturers and cartoon characters, but is just as illegal with smaller logos of more unrecognizable designs. You can’t know every design out there but with access to the internet, you can sometimes search a logo graphically and find it. Know who you’re doing business with. Even if you unknowingly infringe and sew a design without authorization, you are every bit as liable as the person who asked you to reproduce it, should the copyright holder decide to make an issue of it legally.

In the industry, there’s a running joke about the “Disney Police”, but it’s no laughing matter. They exists in the form of whole divisions of corporations that do nothing other than to uphold the company’s copyrights and prosecute people, Disney and Harley Davidson being the ones that first come to mind.

As I said, there are some exceptions. Companies, franchisers and organizations like Girl/Boy Scout troops and car dealerships who sell particular makes have the right to use those logos however the company/organization stipulates that they must get their logoed items from them (the company) directly or through channels set up by them in order to insure the quality and integrity of their logos. The exception comes in if you get written permission from them to recreate/use the logo or get set up as a preferred vendor.

With professional sports teams, permission/licensing is applied and paid for and is very expensive and rigorous. The other thing you’ll run up against is car enthusiasts and collector clubs. Just because they are a Coca-Cola Collector Club or the Corvette Club (or own a corvette) doesn’t give them the right to use the logo.

Along with trademarked designs comes a thing called trade dress. Trade dress creates a visual impression which functions like a word trademark. Basically, a design doesn’t have to even have the name of the company on it to be covered by their copyright. That means, a picture of a Volkswagen Beetle is essentially the same as the Volkswagen logo for our purposes. This is why stock design companies have removed car designs from their offerings for the most part unless the car is so generic as not to be relatable to a specific make or model.

And one other thing, there’s a common misconception that if you change a logo or design by 10%, it is a new design and as such is no longer covered by the copyright. Not true. Don’t fall for it.

In Part II, we’ll discuss the copyrights of designs created legally.
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Information contained in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as professional legal advice. Companies mentioned in this article are used only as examples. Contact a copyright lawyer in your area for specific legal determinations and issues.

For more information about NeedleUp's digitizing services, please visit our website at www.needleup.com where you can view some of our most recent work and get pricing and more information on contacting us. Donna Lehmann is owner of NeedleUp Digitizing and she can be reached at 303-287-6633

Pathing and the Colorway to Success

Pathing is one of the most important elements to master in the process of digitizing. Quite simply, pathing means the order in which the design sews; what sews first and what sews second plus the progression of the design from first stitch to last. Efficient pathing is a design with the fewest trims possible and minimal color breaks. An optimal one color design would have only one trim which is at the end. This would mean that everything was planned or pathed so that all parts of the design were sewn without stopping. To do this, all stitches traveling between elements of the design are covered by the later parts of the stitching. The best way to start digitizing a logo, is to plan out the design in your head before you begin.

Along with pathing, color breaks go hand in hand. Generally, the design will need to be digitized from the background to the foreground so that elements of the design on top fall in front of parts that should be behind. The idea is to only visit each color of the design once if you can. (Some designs may require you to revisit colors later in the logo). A 3 color design that has 52 trims is a very poorly pathed design. Each trim is another possible thread break or pull out and slows the machine down. As an old boss of mine used to say, “We aren’t making money if the machine’s not running .”

The efficiency of an embroidery design is most apparent at the machine. If you are an embroiderer, it will be the first thing you notice and the first thing that will make you crazy if it’s not right. If the machine keeps stopping throughout an order making the job take longer, you may need to charge more for production. A poor design can make the job take 2 to 3 times longer.

If you’re a promotional products salesperson, the first thing that you’ll notice is how much hair your embroiderer is losing. This is where a quality digitizer breaks out front of the “cheap” pack. It’s great to pay only $25.00 for digitizing until your embroiderer has to charge you for editing and longer production times. Your embroiderer may even refuse to sew a design that’s really bad. If your embroiderer cringes every time you walk in the door, you may be using the wrong digitizer.

NeedleUp Digitizing is the “right digitizer”. We have the experience and knowledge to create consistently great designs that are beautiful and efficient at the machine making your run times minimal!

*****NeedleUp Digitizing is owned by Donna Lehmann. You can contact Donna by email: donna@needleup.com or call us at 303-287-6633 M-F. Visit our website for pictures of some of our recent work: www.needleup.com *****

The Design Part of Embroidery Designs

Often, I get company logos that very clearly weren’t originally intended for embroidery, to digitize. When a company designs their logo, they rarely think the design through for all the mediums it will be used with and focus completely on what the design looks like in print. This is detrimental later, once all their letterhead and signage is finished and they begin to think about doing shirts for employees and promotional give-aways. Then, they have an issue with consistency between all their different marketing efforts and their chosen logo.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing your company logo with regard to embroidery:

If you choose a design with too small or too much lettering, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to sew in thread. You may have to resort to screenprinting since the size of the text can be printed smaller rather than sewn. Of course, screenprinting doesn’t look nearly as nice ;)

Don’t use cool gradient color effects or multiple borders around anything unless you plan to make the embroidery very large. Gradients only work in larger areas of fill and with colors that will blend smoothly like several shades of the same color. For instance, there is no natural color blend from purple to green so this isn’t a good idea. Two and three (or more) borders/shadows around letters look great in print but cause embroidery problems; everything from too thin to sew and distorted letters to registration problems and most likely you’ll have to drop all but one. If the letters are minimum size, the border won’t work at all.

Remember, when designing your logo, simple is better. Choose cleaner text that is readable at a distance of about 3 feet. A normal sized embroidery logo for left chest is about 2.5” to 4” wide. Leave the phone numbers for your business card; no one is going to rush up with a notepad to scribble down the number from your shirts. Have the graphic artist set up your design on light and dark backgrounds so you can see what it looks like against different colors and be sure to tell him/her that your design will be used for embroidery also. If you stick to design elements that translate well to embroidery, you’ll be proud to wear your logo on all your garments.

NeedleUp has the experience to consult with you on the embroidery side and digitize your design, translating it to embroidery while keeping the integrity of your logo within your marketing vision. Visit our website: http://www.needleup.com  or call us at 303-287-6633 for impressive results!

Digitizing an Embroidery Design…..Sans Artwork

Customers come to me from time to time with a shirt from an old embroidery to digitize from. They either have lost the stitch file or can’t get the file from the previous embroiderer and their customer says they don’t have any art….so they’re giving us an old shirt. Now depending on the customer and the quality of the embroidery on the shirt, this could be a problem. Here’s why:

Remember, the customer doesn’t know how all this works. They just know they want more shirts and while they seem nonchalant about the design details at the beginning, rest assured they will closely scrutinize the design once you’ve done it. Save yourself some time, sweat and trouble by addressing the issues of the design before you begin.

The first thing I find out in this situation, is what they liked and disliked about the design on the garment….size, detail, colors, placement, everything. There’s no point in recreating the design exactly only to have them say they would like the font different or the shape of something changed. If they say they hated the whole thing (oh yes, it’s happened) press for artwork so you can start fresh.

You also should press for artwork if the shirt is distorted or warped in some way (like from multiple washings) and the design or lettering is crooked and puckered. It will take much more work to get everything straight without something straight to work from. Obviously, there had to be artwork somewhere, at some point, for the design to be done originally. Without artwork, the very fine details of the design are difficult to see and duplicate, especially from a poorly digitized design. 75% of the time, if you say you’re going to need artwork to move forward, they’ll magically be able to find it.

Conversely, I usually ask if the customer has had their logo digitized before. I’ve digitized designs from artwork only to have the customer tell me that it doesn’t look like the shirts they had previously done. Turns out the last design was either done from different artwork or was altered for the embroidery process in some way. Since I can’t recreate a design I haven’t seen, we have to start fresh, which wastes time and money.

Once you know what the customer really wants the final result to be, you can work accordingly, correcting your design to change the things they hated and recreating what they liked about it.

Customers still think what we do is somehow magical or that art gets fed into the computer and just squirts out a design on the other side. {Those are the $25 flat rate people :)} They don’t realize the technical knowledge it takes to program quality embroidery designs. It’s your job to guide them through the process and make sure they get what they want. Our job is to be in your corner and provide you with professional digitizing! Contact NeedleUp when you need stellar embroidery designs that enhance your efficiency.

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NeedleUp Digitizing LLC is owned and operated by Donna Lehmann, a 20yr veteran of the embroidery/digitizing industry. She can be reached at NeedleUp, donna@needleup.com or 303-287-6633 for digitizing, consultation and classes M-F.