Design Thievery, or Design Inevitability?
I realize that this article is about more than the SearchMash ”controversy”, but I want to comment on that aspect for a moment and leave the explicit thieves aside for now…
Design is meant to be consumed. When we create “designs”, we are communicating to an audience. For effective communication to take place, we need to communicate using forms and modes that are in keeping with the visual language of the audience which we are communicating with.
(Sorry for the didactic digression there, just had to clarify that.)
Hence the preponderance of similar designs and modes of communication. This is not to say that one is ripping off the other, but it’s inevitable that these things are going to happen when the audience groups overlap… (part of the “context” Eric mentions). Heck, my company has had its share of surprises and disconcerting similarities over the past few years.
It’s really an unfortunate combination of letterforms that makes the Google’s SearchMash logo look like a rip-off of the SmashLAB logo. There are only so many variations you can create when working within a fixed set of rules that include: right-angle corners, lowercase forms, a composition focus on thirds, etc. Rearrange the letters and the effect is less obvious (see top two words, which are a quick remix of the searchmash letters), but still similar.
Sure, perhaps Google should have done their homework (is the smashLAB logo trademarked? I suspect not…), but I propose, Eric, that you don’t have a monopoly on “squared-techie-compound-word” logomarks.
If you’re creating design that’s influenced by a culture and created for an audience, you shouldn’t be surprised when others come up with the same thing on their own.
Now that this is all said… I think smashLAB should sue Google. Everybody else does, and they actually have legitimate grounds!
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