Originality in Logo Design
by Mike Davidson
“Never waste a stroke.”
That’s the best piece of advice you’ll ever get in logo design. However, it’s also advice that can inadvertently get you in trouble. Draw a blue circle on the screen and you’ve just stolen the Blaupunkt logo. Draw a yellow line and you’re copying Visa. Draw a black swoosh and you’re ripping off Nike. The less intricacies involved in creating your masterpiece, the more likely it is that someone has already created it.
This subject has resurfaced in my head this week because of a couple of questionable logo unveilings, and I think it deserves some discussion. First, let’s go over the three categories of what might be considered “logo theft”:
The shameless pixel-for-pixel ripoff
Master illustrator Josh Williams posted earlier this week about a company called MaxMost.com who was displaying as their logo an exact pixel-for-pixel copy of the logo he had earlier created for SquareSpace. The two logos are pictured below:
It is obvious, even to the untrained eye, that the similarities here are no coincidence. Everything is perfectly identical, right down to the shading of the elements. This sort of theft is not very common, because it is a) blatantly illegal, b) blatantly immoral, c) hardly defensible, and d) easily discoverable. For these reasons, it is almost never the fault of the company who is displaying the logo and can almost always be traced back to a dishonest person (we won’t call him/her a “designer”) outside the company who was contracted to produce something.
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