Graphic and digital design near you

The line that matters most here sits under 3D. A rendering, a SketchUp model or a measured 3D model of a building is real design work and it is not a construction drawing. In Ontario, "architect" is a title protected in law: only a licensed member of the Ontario Association of Architects may use the word, and a permit set has to come from somebody the Building Code says is qualified to prepare it — a designer registered with a BCIN for most house-scale work, or a licensed architect or professional engineer, whose seal the Code requires above the size and use thresholds it sets. Nothing structural, load-bearing or permit-bound is settled by a picture, however convincing it looks. A designer who renders your extension is showing you the idea; the person who signs the permit set is the one who makes it buildable, and they are usually not the same person.

Signage splits along the same seam, into a part that is open and a part that is not. Drawing a sign is design work: the lettering, the layout, the colour, and whether it still reads from across the street. Getting it onto a building is a permit matter. Toronto runs its own sign by-law with rules that change by district, Mississauga, Vaughan and Markham each run their own, an illuminated sign brings electrical work and an inspection with it, and a shopfront inside a heritage conservation district or a business improvement area is designed to published guidelines before anyone applies for anything. Find out which of those apply to your address early, because they change the artwork rather than merely delaying it.

Who owns the artwork afterwards is the question people skip and then regret. Under Canadian copyright law the person who creates a work is normally its first owner, even when you commissioned it and paid for it, and ownership moves to you through a written assignment rather than through an invoice. So put it in the agreement: full rights, and the working files, not only a flattened export. Registering a name or a mark as a trademark is a separate matter again, done through the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, where only a registered trademark agent may act on your behalf. A logo designer is not that, and a good one will tell you so unprompted.

What produces a sharp offer here is material rather than adjectives. Send what already exists, an old logo, photographs, a colour you have to match, the file formats you need at the end, and then say where the finished thing has to work: a phone screen, a shop window, an embroidered shirt, a printed carton. That last point decides more than taste does. Print has to be built to a press specification from the start rather than fixed afterwards, and anything sold as a packaged consumer product in Canada carries bilingual labelling requirements that shape the layout instead of sitting on top of it. The GTA adds a second version of the same problem, because a large share of print here runs in more than one language and more than one script, and line lengths, fonts carrying the right glyphs and reading direction all have to be designed in.