Protect plans, sketches, and renders of your projects

The situation

You present a full renovation project to a client: moodboard, inspiration boards, 2D plans, 3D renders, material selection, lighting plan. The client finds the quote too high. A few months later, you walk past the property and see construction underway — and you recognize your project, executed by another contractor or by the client themselves, with your design choices, your materials, your spatial arrangement.

Or: you're a licensed architect, you deliver a feasibility study to a project owner. The full contract doesn't go ahead. Later, you discover that another firm was hired and that your architectural concept was reused almost identically.

These situations are far more common than the profession publicly acknowledges. The problem is rarely the absence of legal rights — it's the absence of dated proof of your work at a specific moment.

The real risk

Most jurisdictions following the Berne Convention protect architectural works, plans, and sketches from the moment of creation. Interior designers benefit from the same copyright protection whenever their work meets the originality threshold.

But protection only activates with evidence. Without an opposable date, you can demonstrate neither that your work existed at a given time, nor that it was yours. The resulting disputes are numerous: tender materials leaking to a competitor, projects delivered but not paid and executed anyway, architectural concepts reused in subsequent projects.

The decision of the Tribunal judiciaire de Marseille on March 20, 2025 (AZ Factory case, RG 23/00046) was the first European court ruling to recognize the probative value of blockchain timestamping. The case concerned fashion sketches, but the legal principle applies to any digital document — including plans, renders and concept boards.

What you can anchor

For an architecture project, what matters goes well beyond the final render handed to the client:

• Sketches and concept notebooks (scans or photos)
• Inspiration boards, moodboards, references
• 2D plans — frozen PDF exports from AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, Revit
• 3D models — PDF exports, screen captures from SketchUp, Revit, Blender, Rhino
• Photorealistic renders (V-Ray, Lumion, Twinmotion)
• Technical detail books (sections, elevations, details)
• Material and finish selections (technical sheets, sample photos)
• Lighting plans, layout grids, furniture plans
• Concept notes, written design rationale, architectural memos
• Cost estimates and pricing notes
• Client correspondence (emails exported as PDF)

Why the bundle changes everything

This may be the profession where the bundle takes on its full meaning. The natural reflex at project completion is to keep only the presentable renders — the ones that go into the portfolio. The initial moodboard, the first sketches, the intermediate plan versions, the rejected iterations: all of this is often discarded or archived without any intent of evidence.

That's precisely the opposite of what you should do if you want to build proof that holds up in a dispute. An anchoring of only the final render shows that you held that file on that date. A bundle containing the full chronology — moodboard, first sketches, three plan versions, final render, material selection, cost estimate — shows the design trajectory, the cluster of evidence that, beyond the date, supports your authorship.

For €2 — the price of a single anchoring — you can fit up to 50 MB of files in a single bundle. A complete architecture project, exported as frozen PDFs, easily fits within that envelope.