Fair Use infographic
INTRODUCTION
With the changes in technology and the push of life, we are all having to learn new skills. At a university, the professors who taught face to face are having to learn how to teach online. With this change comes the benefit of more usable content, if you know how to properly use it.
PROBLEM
Professors are misusing content and not understanding the laws around fair use.
SOLUTION
Educate on better use of needed and used content. How? by defining the laws, simplifying the definitions, then organizing that information and providing it to be used and studied.
Step one: Idea storm and sketching.
From a past project “Comprehensive Guide of Copyright Infringement”, I only did the final edit… the team made a guide to help identify some copyright infringement misbelieves and common mistakes by giving good/bad examples on a list with links out at the bottom to tryals and different industry guides. This first project was the inspiration and general guide for the Fair Use project.
So I sketched some header graphics trying to find the feel of each statement. The problem I quickly ran into is that this project has more than two sides to each category. Fair use has more of a weight than a hard yes or no.
How do you explain the heart or nature of a peace of work? Can I say 10% of work is okay to use? Is the face the heart of the painting or is the background? How do I define the Nature of work with a graphic? especially if that if the project is a legal document…
Back to sketching and idea gathering.
With a focus of some use of scales to help show that there is no hard yes or no.
Two ideas of how to present the information.
- make a list and do more okay and less okay practices of fair use.
- make a graphic that helps represent the 4 categories of fair use and give examples with them.
The focus of this piece was to inform students and professors on the laws of fair use in a short and readable manner. Another goal is to help them find or get questions answered. I feel that we have been able to do this.
I designed this using the ideas from the second graphic. All colors used are from the UVU approved colors. Knowing my first prototypes had a lot of green in them and knowing that you can use too much of a brands main color I used highlight colors with UVU’s green. Knowing that this was the design I wanted to go with and the team agreed that this would be one of the best ways of presenting the information about fair use I asked what the graphic designer thought.
And this is what he handed back.
I can work with graphics and make mockups and prototypes but there are some things I still don't have the practice and used knowledge to make graphics looks so good. I can see where and why the graphic designer made his changes and I'm in love with what he was able to hand back to me.
Something that I spotted is that the circles serve another function.
They can now be used individually. This allows for new use, individual stickers for reminders.
The project is largely done at this point. What's left is the language and explanations need to be cleaned up and ran through legal. Once that is done the graphic will be ready to use both online and print.
