At the launch, the host thanks the team. Your design appears on the screen. Your name does not. It may be an innocent omission; it may be the result of a system in which the person who presents the work is remembered more readily than the people who made it. Either way, the image travels faster than the correction.

Credit is sometimes treated as a matter of ego, as though wanting your name beside your labour were an embarrassment. In creative work it is also a record. It affects who can find you, who can hire you and whose history can be written accurately later. A missing name makes a career harder to trace.

Start with a precise request. Send the correct credit line, the places it should appear and a requested correction date. Ask how future materials will be checked. If the work was collaborative, name the roles rather than letting a single headline swallow everybody else. The photographer, stylist, editor, researcher and maker need not compete for one author’s chair; a careful credit can describe what each person actually did.

There can be real risk in making this request. Freelancers may worry about losing a client, and people whose work is routinely treated as background may be told they are making a fuss. That is why a credit agreement belongs in the brief, the contract and the file names before the launch. A small system can spare many people the labour of pleading afterward.

The Creative Hero’s Journey calls its second realm Permission. It asks who gets to speak for the work and what it takes to remain present as its author. You may also want to read When Your Talent Became Your Job, on the difference between being valued for a skill and deciding where that skill goes.

You are allowed to want the record to be true. Send the line with your name on it.