Lesson 1, Topic 1
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Week 2 – Practice

Week 2 — Practice | The Design Industry, Briefs & Copyright
Week 2 · Practice · 2 of 4

Practice — The Design Industry

Practice this week is mostly thinking and judging, not pushing pixels. You'll work through a rights-triage drill, a design-principle audit, and a creative-brief rewrite. None of these have a single right answer; all of them have wrong answers.

~45 min total 3 drills Day 2–3

Drill 1 — Rights Triage — 10 sample assets

Purpose: Decide whether each asset is usable, usable with attribution, or not usable — and justify in one sentence.

  1. Wikimedia public-domain photo of the Eiffel Tower (no copyright, no usage restrictions). Decision: usable. Attribution: not required but good practice.
  2. Instagram repost of a sunset photo, original creator unknown. Decision: not usable. Reasoning: cannot verify license without source.
  3. CC BY 4.0 photo of a coffee shop from Flickr. Decision: usable with attribution. Attribution string: 'Photo by [Name], CC BY 4.0, [link]'.
  4. Adobe Stock preview JPG with watermark. Decision: not usable in deliverable. Previews are comping-only.
  5. Your own photo from your phone, taken last week. Decision: usable. You own the copyright.
  6. CC BY-NC photo on Flickr. Decision: usable for non-commercial only. If this is for a client project, not usable.
  7. Screenshot of a logo from a brand's website. Decision: not usable without permission. Logos are trademarked.
  8. Adobe Stock Standard licensed image you've paid for. Decision: usable up to license limits (no merchandise, <500K print runs).
  9. 1920 illustration from the Library of Congress. Decision: usable (public domain — pre-1928 + government source).
  10. AI-generated image from Adobe Firefly. Decision: usable, with explicit disclosure that it's AI-generated. (Adobe's terms cover commercial use.)
📌 Self-check. If you got 7+ correct, you're ready for real source-log work. Below 7? Review Section 4 of the Lesson before the source-log build on Day 3.

Drill 2 — Design-Principle Audit

Purpose: Look at any three pieces of design near you — a poster, a magazine ad, a packaging label. For each, identify which design principles are operating most strongly.

  1. Pick a piece of design. Don't pick something digital — pick something physical you can see in front of you.
  2. For each of the seven principles (contrast, hierarchy, alignment, repetition, balance, white space, color), rate how strongly it appears: strong, present, or weak.
  3. Pick the strongest two. Write one sentence on how each one contributes to the design's effectiveness.
  4. Pick the weakest two. Write one sentence on what could improve them.
  5. Repeat for two more pieces of design. Compare your notes — what patterns emerge?

This drill is not graded — but the habit of auditing real-world design against the seven principles is what builds a designer's eye. Do it twice this week and twice a week for the rest of the course.

Drill 3 — Brief Rewrite

Purpose: Take this badly-written brief and rewrite it with the five must-knows clearly identified.

The original brief (intentionally bad)

'Hey, can you make us something edgy and modern but also classic and approachable for our launch? We want everyone to love it. Make it pop. Send it Friday.'

Rewrite this brief so that purpose, audience, audience needs, output specifications, and accessibility requirements are all explicit. Invent the missing details — that's the point. Your rewrite is your hypothesis about what the client meant.

  1. Purpose. Replace 'launch' with a specific deliverable type and goal.
  2. Audience. Replace 'everyone' with one persona.
  3. Audience needs. Replace 'love it' with a measurable response.
  4. Output specs. Add dimensions, format, color mode, and where the asset will appear.
  5. Accessibility. Add contrast ratio, readable type size, and any alt-text requirement.