Plagiarism in branding and logo design

They say that ‘plagiarism is the highest form of flattery’, Look at these logos for examples of blatant design ‘cribbing’.

Rio 2016 vs Telluride

The Rio 2016 Logo has obvious similarities to the Telluride Foundation, a Colorado charity. Fred  Geilli, from a Brazilian design agency said that they had never seen the Telluride logo before it was pointed out to him.

But they surely saw another logo from a little closer to home. Here the Salvador Carnival logo. Hmm, very similar,  I wonder if anyone pointed this out to Mr Geill.?

Unilver vs Swiat Zdrowia

Here is the truly wonderful and quite brilliant Unilever logo, this has obviously been ripped of by Swiat Zdrowia, a polish drugs company – they have only altered the shape and the colour – is too blatant and Unilever are one of the worlds biggest companies, its going to be hard to hide from this.

Scottish Arts Council Vs Quark

Quark is a huge software company supplying desktop publishing for years to graphic designers – you would think they would know better than to blatantly steel the logo of a small government office. These are too close to be a co-incidence; in fact they are so similar you would be forgiven for thinking that Quark was a division of the Scottish Arts Council.

Barack Obama Vs Mit Romney

Reports have it that one do the reasons that Mit Romney failed in his recent presidential campaign was that he wasn’t unique enough, even down to his Bumper sticker (loved by the Americans, not so popular over here in the UK). Here’s an example that backs up that fact, although we think that Romneys version, (seen here in the right) has better colouring, the blue and red are more colourful and vibrant, less incipid than Obama’s – even the message is more poignant – but what lets it down is the layout, blatant layout hijacking of Obamas!.

But copying of ideas is not just restricted to logo design and branding, product design has seen see here the Samsung ‘wannabe iPhone’ Smartphone.

Lady Gaga is renowned all of the world for being unique in her appearance and creative styling. But she was obviously not a Kylie fan back in 2007, using exactly the same font and similar styling to Kylie’s ‘Hearts’ CD cover. Pigeon holed into the same box, these two artists are surely too similar surely for this to have gone un-notcied, how did Lady Gaga think she could get away with it?

Lady Gaga has also been criticised for following in Madonna’s footsteps, however brand Madonna is by no means unique, she has built her multimillion career by manipulating her visual brand and following the in the footsteps of the Hollywood greats that have gone before her. She breaks the rules of visual copyright, yet gets away with it. She goes against everything mentioned in this blog post.

Check out this article you’ll be amazed at how much Madonna has copied from elsewhere. The Madonna brand is copied and pasted from someone else:  Madonna is the queen of plagiarism

Being unique is what sets you apart from everyone else in your industry, being unique is what makes your customers remember you, copying from elsewhere can bring you attention for all the wrong reasons such as these we have mentioned here, even if Madonna can get away with it, its unlikely you will.