Nope. There’ll probably be something in the contract that protects the client against this sort of stuff, and the agency is in hot water now. But beyond that, t

Nope. There’ll probably be something in the contract that protects the client against this sort of stuff, and the agency is in hot water now. But beyond that, there’s no real process in place. For big projects the cost of sourcing images will be billed back to the client and so everyhing works like it’s meant to. But I imagine in this case, the DVD packaging was a last minute ad hoc peice of work where the client asked a bunch of agencies (or the clients main agency asked a bunch of smaller agencies) to pitch a design for a fixed budget on a short deadline. And probably a small budget. The agency asks a junior designer to turn the brief around in a day and says “there’s no budget, but we need to keep this client happy (if they’re the main agency) or we need to impress this client (if they’re a subcontracted agency or an agency not on the clients book). And that’s where things went wrong. No money. No time. And a junior designer eager to impress.