1A.) In the visual communication industry, ethics are formed in order for us designers to have a clear conscience on how the code of conduct works in workplace and industry culture. It is important as budding creative designers that we must follow said code of conduct in order to not get ourselves into trouble if our works happened to be problematic in some kind of way. With that said, my tasks as a design associate intern is to not only design things like magazine covers, articles, t-shirt designs and other forms of visual media the company needs, but to also make sure that my designs do not go against the code of conduct that will put a negative impact to the company. For things like the logo and the articles that are used for the magazine article designs, the content was provided by the organization for the designers to use for their brand. However for other assets I required for my designs, I try to search for websites that provided royalty-free images for commercial use to try and avoid infringing copyright and fair use. With that said, my designs has gotten favorable feedback from the organization and I feel as if I accomplished something by designing the deliverables for the organization. With that said, I gave AIGA’s Guide to Copyright a thorough read and it reflects certain elements of a design can be excluded from copyright, i.e. typefaces. This reflects on when in my internship, the main font they use is from Google fonts, and normally all the fonts from that website is free for commercial use.
1B.) For the non-profit organization I am doing my internship for, aside from the internship agreement form I have to sign up and send to the supervisor, there was no form of non-disclosure agreement as well as any form of contract that the company provided. Despite that, I still have the common decency to not infringe or disclose any information regarding the personnel involved in the company as well as their personal lives whenever I made my journal entries. After all I am seeking to gain experience in working at a company, organization, business firm etc., not infringing or disclosing anything private about the co-workers and other personnel in the organization. I try to be as not provide any specific names of the personnel involved for the sake of their privacy, Not only it is the right thing to do, it is common human decency and a good sense of morals. According to AIGA’s A Client’s Guide to Design, it stresses out enough that it is the designer’s responsibility to communicate with the truth to the pubic and to avoid making false claims and misinformation that could lead to the company having a bad reputation. I keep that message in mind whenever I design a work for the organization so my designs will reflect on what the organization stands for in their overall mission.
Source(s):
AIGA Business Ethics-Guide to Copyright: https://bbhosted.cuny.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-73245777-dt-content-rid-561964859_1/xid-561964859_1
AIGA Business Ethics-Client’s Guide to Design: https://bbhosted.cuny.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-73245777-dt-content-rid-561964856_1/xid-561964856_1
