Abstract
Online presentations of digital art place artists in an ongoing trade-off between gaining exposure and protecting copyright, one that current platforms inadequately support. As a result, artists often rely on aesthetic watermarks, yet how they manage this balance remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted a co-creation workshop with 18 digital artists and examined how they design aesthetic watermarks in practice. Analysis reveals three key concerns shaping their decisions: aesthetic integrity, semantic fidelity, and protective functionality. Participants struggled to manage the tension between protection and artistic completeness, while also expressing growing concerns about the security of their work, facing rapid AI advancement. These design choices reveal how artists are forced to compensate for gaps in platform governance and technical systems through their own effort. We argue that copyright protection should move beyond technical solutions toward institutional redesign that empowers artists and restores dignity within the digital art ecosystem.
Keywords
aesthetic watermark, digital artwork protection, co-design, design ethics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2128
Citation
Fang, R., Ran, C., Cui, S., Meng, X., Li, B., and Liu, F. (2026) Balancing aesthetics and protection: How digital artists navigate structural inequities through aesthetic watermarking, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2128
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Balancing aesthetics and protection: How digital artists navigate structural inequities through aesthetic watermarking
Online presentations of digital art place artists in an ongoing trade-off between gaining exposure and protecting copyright, one that current platforms inadequately support. As a result, artists often rely on aesthetic watermarks, yet how they manage this balance remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted a co-creation workshop with 18 digital artists and examined how they design aesthetic watermarks in practice. Analysis reveals three key concerns shaping their decisions: aesthetic integrity, semantic fidelity, and protective functionality. Participants struggled to manage the tension between protection and artistic completeness, while also expressing growing concerns about the security of their work, facing rapid AI advancement. These design choices reveal how artists are forced to compensate for gaps in platform governance and technical systems through their own effort. We argue that copyright protection should move beyond technical solutions toward institutional redesign that empowers artists and restores dignity within the digital art ecosystem.