Legal and Ethical constraints that apply to social media and website design.

Copyright

Definition: Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time.

Andy Warhol was once sued for copyright infringement for using photos that he hadn't taken himself and changing them to make them his own work, although some people call it appropriation others would call it stealing. If people have copyrighted something and another person uses it without giving credit to the person it belongs to then they can be sued, copy right is exactly what it says it gives you the right to copy the thing that has been copyrighted.

Another case of copyright infringement/appropriation is Roy Lichtenstein, he painted Kiss V. When this painting was changed slightly and used as an album cover the artist of the cover was confronted with a claim that she copied Lichtenstein's work but Roy hadn't been honest about his original source, as it turns out the album artist had just used the same source.

Intellectual property rights

Definition: A right that is had by a person or a company to have exclusive rights to use its own ides, plans or other intangible assets without the worry of competition.

This protects ownership of your work as an artist, writer, photographer, designer, musician etc. It protects anything that come up with that may only be in your mind so far, inventions are sometimes stolen and that is against intellectual property rights because it was not their idea or work to use. 

Permissions

If you want to use something that has been trademarked or copyrighted and you don't want to break the law you can ask the person who copyrighted or trademarked it for their permission to use it. This makes us able to use it without any law suits and the person who owns it knows that it is being used, who is using it and what it is being used for.

Libel and sensitivity to groups of society

What you say or show in your work can be seen by many people of different genders, religions and ethnicities, what you say and show can offend people and so you need to make sure that you don't put anything into your work that can offend people because it may put people off buying products that you are advertising or they might even complain about your work and it could be banned.

Decency

Decency involves any rude explicit or inappropriate work, children could see your work any most parents wouldn't want their children seeing anything that they couldn't. This also affects people of different religions as in some religions nudity is frowned upon and again they could find it very offensive to see.

Safeguarding

Age restrictions are usually put on games and films to show that their content is for people above a certain age, this prevents young children seeing things in them such as nudity or violence. People who buy the game/film have to be of the age (or above) the age restriction on the game/film, unless bought by a parent, this is so that children cannot buy games or films that contain things that they shouldn't see but if their parent buys it for them their parent obviously then knows that they might see something of this nature.

Adding videos

I decided to add three youtube videos to my The Summer Set page, I used their three newest singles and now the page looks like this:

Wix website creator

Over the past few days I've been using Wix website creator to make a functioning website, I started using IM Creator to start with but after I lost all of my work I decided to use a different website and I found Wix. I've stuck with my original idea of a lyrical typography (The Summer Set lyrics) and photo editing website and I have really enjoyed making my website, I've used black white and red because they are simple colours that go well together and they don't take the focus away form the work I'm displaying on the website. Below are screenshots of my website.

This is my home page

This is my Lyrical Typography page which leads to the following three pages:

My Love Like This page

My Everything's fine page

And my Legendary page

This is my The Summer Set Page

 This is my Photo Editing page

Creating Sprys

Go to Insert, Spry and Spry Menu Bar (as below)

You can also add sub pages to the spry like this:

To do this you simply rename the titles in the properties bar

You can even add sub menus to the sub menus like this:

Starting a website in DreamWeaver

To start a website in DreamWeaver open up the application and click HTML

The page will come up as either a code, design or split page, this is how a split page looks:

You will need to add a title to your website (as above)

Make sure you save your website

My website

Originally I was supposed to make a website in Dreamweaver but now I'm going to use Dreamweaver to show i can make a basic website and use sprys and then create an actual website using an online template. This way the final product will look better and will take less time, it also shows that I can do both and so it could even get me more marks.

Logo

I've made a logo for my website using Photoshop, the name I'm using is Char Moon Lyrical Typography and Photo Editing.

Lyrics

As i will be using The Summer Set lyrics for my lyrical typography i've decided to blog about some of them. Because they are an American Indie Rock band their lyrics are often very meaningful and so really good for typography.

Another Pinterest board

I've started to make another Pinterest board on Lyrical Typography (Pinterest Account: http://pinterest.com/charlotte1241/)

Change of plans

I've decided that I'd make the concept for my website a little bit simpler and I've make it a lyrical typography and photo editing website. I'll still be doing The Summer Set lyrics but i will no longer be doing merchandise designs. I also said I'd update my Blogger as I change the design of my website. This is how far i've gotten so far.

Enter Page:

Home page:

How the internet can help to expose your work

Lots of websites are very useful for putting your work out there for companies and possible clients to find, without websites like these it would definitely be a lot harder for you to show your work to a global audience. Websites like Blogger, Pinterest, Instagram, Behance and Deviant Art make it a lot easier for people to find you and your work and so it has become a popular thing to put your work on the internet. 

The internet can also help the people that see your work on websites like these get into contact with you to offer you jobs and commissions to work on. It also helps you to send your work (especially big files or documents) with websites like bigfile, that can send large documents and files by email. 

Today's work

Today i've been doing sketches for possible merchandise designs, i prefer to do these digitally but as i didn't have the software at home that i do at college and i needed to improve my drawing skills i decided that this would be a good idea. I will eventually turn these sketches into digital designs. I have also been researching lyrical typography and have made a board on my Pinterest account: http://pinterest.com/charlotte1241/ of other people work.
I really like the idea of lyrical typography because i really love music and graphic design so it is a way to mix the two and create my own work. Some lyrics are also really meaningful and can be great sayings and quotes to use as lyrical typography. I've created some lyrical typography using The Summer Set lyrics before and i will put these designs onto my website when i get it running.

More patterns

I made another pattern today but i experimented with using two photos.
These are the two photos i started with:

This is the pattern i ended up with:

Website

As a separate part of this project we also have to create a website, the first part of making a website is planning and so i have to mock up what i would like my home page to look like. I must use all of my own images and edit them all myself. I decided to make this website as a way to show the work i have created, it will be a website full of lyrical typography that i have created for the band i have previously mentioned (The Summer Set) and some merchandise designs for the same band. On the website i will show the research i have done about band merchandise and lyrical typography and also some information about the band themselves and their music.

The Summer Set are an American indie rock band and so at first i was confused as to how i could use primary imagery for this project, after a talk with one of my teachers he suggested that i take the name and come up with things that it reminds me of (summer, trees, sun, blue skies, cherry blossoms) and use these things as my primary imagery. Another idea we came up with was to take pictures of the band when i go to see them live on 1st June at the Deaf Institute, Manchester, England. These ideas have definitely helped me come up with more ideas and i have now started to mock up my home page, i will blog more about how that is going later in the week and i will probably upload photos of the mock up as i go along.

This is my mock up of my home page so far:

Making patterns

Today i decided to make some patterns that could be used on clothing, i took pictures that i had taken of random things like trees or the sky and turned them into patterns using Photoshop. To do this i edited the picture until it was bright enough or the colour was right and then duplicated the image and placed them around the page until the pattern repeated itself, this is how the image started and what the pattern turned out like:

Web design companies- Clock Creative

Clock Creative- http://www.clockcreative.co.uk

Clock Creative have worked with:

• Virgin Media
• PetSafe
• The Lowry
• Care Shop

They can be contacted in multiple ways

You can view their work on their website but here are some examples of the kind of work they do

Web Design Companies- Creative Spark

My tutor has set me another task to check out local web design companies. Web design companies generally do design websites, to do this means having quite a few skills such as web graphic design, interface design, authoring (standardised code and proprietary software), user experience design and search engine optimization.

Creative Spark- http://www.creativespark.co.uk

Creative Spark have worked with:

• Kitbag
• Co-operative
• Manchester United
• Universal
• Basics
• JD Sports
• We Buy Any Car
• Sony
• Mag
• Nike
• BBC
• Gigs and Tours

They do four kinds of work

You can view their work on their website but here are some examples of the kind of work they do

You can contact them too

First few of my own designs

I went away and spent a while designing some example merchandise for a band called The Summer Set, I incorporated their logo in the designs and i came out with quite a few good designs. I used tshirts and socks to begin with as they are some of the more common merchandise that bands sell. Here are some of my designs:

The design above is my favourite of all of them because it could be unisex and the logo is clear. I used an existing piece of The Summer Set's merchandise (shown below) as an influence for this design but I changed parts of it to make it my own design.