Using our diagrams

Using our diagrams

You may use Ink Learning diagrams in lessons, presentations, handouts and VLE materials without asking or paying. The licence applies to the diagram files, not to third-party material or the surrounding lesson text. The terms and attribution requirements are set out below.

The terms

The diagram files are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). The licence in its own words is at creativecommons.org, and the full legal text is one click further on. What it means in practice is that you may copy a diagram, put it in a handout, crop it, annotate it, translate the labels, project it, print it, and pass the result to anybody else, for as long as you credit us and do not do it for commercial advantage.

What we treat as non-commercial

“Non-commercial” is a phrase that leaves careful people guessing, and the people it leaves guessing are the ones this page is for. So here is what we treat as non-commercial, said plainly, so that you do not have to decide it for yourself. All of these are fine:

That list is a permission from us on top of the licence rather than part of it, which is worth knowing for one reason: the Creative Commons licence cannot be withdrawn from a copy you already have, and this list can be changed. If we ever change it, we would not apply the change to work you had already made.

Republishing the drawings as the illustration of a revision site, app or course of your own, whether you charge for it or carry advertising against it, is what the NonCommercial term refuses, and asking us is the way past it rather than reading the term generously. Write to support@inklearning.co.uk and say what you want to do. The answer is not automatically no.

How to credit us

Under a figure, on a slide, in the corner of a worksheet. The drawing’s own title comes first, and this is the whole of it:

Projectile independence · Ink Learning Ltd, inklearning.co.uk/reuse/, CC BY-NC 4.0

Where there is room, or where you are publishing on the web:

“Projectile independence” by Ink Learning Ltd, from https://inklearning.co.uk/physics/assets/figures/projectile-independence.svg, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Fonts embedded in the file are not covered; see https://inklearning.co.uk/reuse/.

The licence lets you meet its conditions in any reasonable way the medium allows, and it offers a link to a page carrying the details as its own example of a reasonable way. That is why the short line points here rather than at the file: our file names are the diagrams’ own descriptions, so they run past a hundred characters, and a credit nobody can read off a slide is a credit nobody keeps. If you changed the diagram, say so: “cropped” or “labels translated” is enough.

What this page does not cover

The fonts are worth a sentence more than the others, because they are the one exclusion that travels inside the file rather than sitting on a page, and because a diagram without them is a diagram whose every label has moved off the position it was checked at. Poppins is © 2020 The Poppins Project Authors, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. DejaVu Sans is © 2003 Bitstream, Inc. (Bitstream Vera is a trademark of Bitstream, Inc.) and © 2006 Tavmjong Bah, under the Bitstream Vera Fonts licence. Every subset we embed carries the copyright and licence records its own copyright holder ships inside the font, which is what both licences ask of a copy; each file says the same thing again in its own metadata. Those typefaces travel inside our files under their own terms and not under ours, and if what you plan to do with them goes beyond showing the drawing, the two licences above are the ones to read.

If you want something this page does not give you

Write to support@inklearning.co.uk and say what you want to do. We would rather have the conversation than have you guess.

These terms took effect in 2026 and apply to the diagram files published at that date and since. A Creative Commons licence cannot be withdrawn from a copy already given, so a change here would apply to copies taken afterwards and to nothing else.