This ticket asks for a clarification how to deal with agencies in the relationships "design/illustration", "graphic design", "photography" and possibly others.

The help text of the artist-release relationship "design/illustration" states: "This indicates a person or agency who did design or illustration for the release."
The help texts of the artist-release relationships "graphic design", "photography" and possibly others refer to an agency, too.

The question to me is how an agency should actually be dealt with. To use the relationship as indicated by the help text, the agency has to be created as an artist. Is this really the intention?
Given the current musicbrainz setup of the entities "artist" and "label", my feeling is that the agency should indeed be a label. However, this does not fit the help text, and moreover, currently there is no label-release counterpart for the mentioned relationships.

In the end, I wonder if the existing differentiation between labels and artists is a bit unfortunate. From a database design point of view, the need for creating duplicate versions (once artist-something, once label-something) of numerous relationships (like the above mentioned "design/illustration", "graphic design", "photography", but also the existing "copyright by", "phonographic copyright by" etc.) shows that the table setup is not optimal.
A common entity for all kinds of persons or groups of persons (artists, engineers, bands, agencies, companies, but also legal persons) might have been better.