The Australian Consumer Law is Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010. It applies to a two-person studio in exactly the way it applies to a national retailer, it is enforced by the ACCC alongside state and territory fair trading regulators, and it does not require anybody to have been harmed for conduct to breach it.
Design practices almost never breach it deliberately. They breach it through copy written in a hurry, a pricing page that leaves out GST, or a testimonial nobody can now locate the source of.
Misleading or deceptive conduct is about impression, not intent
The central prohibition catches conduct that is misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive. Two features of it surprise people:
Intent is irrelevant. An honest mistake can still be misleading conduct. There is no “we did not mean it that way” defence.
The overall impression governs. A statement that is literally true can still mislead if the impression it creates is false — including through what it leaves out, or how prominent the qualification is compared to the claim.
That second point is where marketing copy gets caught. A headline claim in 48-point type with the caveat in grey 10-point at the bottom of the page is a well-worn pattern, and regulators are entirely familiar with it.
Claims about services, qualifications and affiliations
The ACL separately prohibits false or misleading representations about services — including representations about their standard, quality or grade, and about approval, sponsorship or affiliation. For a design practice, the risky categories are predictable:
Qualifications and registrations. These must be current, held by the person described, and correctly named. A lapsed registration described in the present tense is a false representation.
Awards. Name the award, the category and the year. “Award-winning” with nothing behind it is a claim you may be asked to substantiate.
Memberships. A membership that has quietly lapsed is still on your footer until somebody removes it.
Project attribution. Work completed by an individual at a previous employer is not the practice's portfolio without careful framing. A gallery implies the studio delivered what is shown.
Team size and capability. Describing contractors as staff, or a serviced address as an office, creates an impression about capacity.
Pricing: the single price must be prominent
The ACL's component pricing rule requires that where a price is advertised to consumers, the total single price is stated at least as prominently as any component of it. In practice this means the GST-inclusive total cannot be assembled by the reader from parts.
For design practices the recurring traps are:
Excluding GST without saying so. A consumer-facing price implies the total payable.
“From $X” anchors. The advertised entry price has to be genuinely available for the service described, not a theoretical floor nobody has ever been charged.
Stale rate cards. A downloadable PDF from two years ago is still a current representation while it remains on the site.
Fee structures split across headings. Design fee here, documentation fee there, site visits charged separately below — if the consumer has to add it up, the prominence requirement is not met.
Testimonials and reviews
Testimonials must be genuine and must reflect a real experience of your service. Fabricated reviews, reviews written by the business or its staff, and incentivised reviews presented as unsolicited are all treated as misleading conduct, and this has been an enduring enforcement priority for the ACCC.
The workable standard for a design practice:
Keep the provenance. Who said it, when, about which project, and where it was originally given.
Get written permission. Particularly for residential clients, whose homes are identifiable in the accompanying photography.
Disclose any incentive. If something was given in exchange, say so.
Do not edit meaning. Trimming for length is fine. Trimming out a reservation is not.
Do not suppress selectively. Publishing only positive reviews while filtering negative ones can itself create a misleading impression.
The same reasoning applies to before-and-after imagery, which is a representation about outcomes. It must be your work, and the comparison must be fair — a “before” shot taken mid-demolition against a professionally styled “after” is making a claim the project did not deliver.
A quarterly review that takes an hour
Registrations, memberships and insurances. Current, correctly named, correctly attributed.
Every price on the site. Including PDFs, old landing pages and anything a search engine can still reach.
Superlatives. “Leading”, “best”, “Australia's most” — can you substantiate it if asked?
Testimonials. Source on file, permission on file.
The portfolio. Every project attributable to the practice as presented.
Ad copy and automated assets. Including anything a platform generated from your pages.
This article is not legal advice. The ACCC publishes a plain-English advertising and selling guide that is worth reading in full, and a lawyer should review anything you are unsure of.