LogoMaid ripoff Mar23 '07

Personally, I don't want to read another comment about this, but I feel the need to share it anyway. Lately the comments are becoming childish and whiny, and the more I look at the comments, the more time I am wasting out of my day.

Maybe I should explain what's going on.

Dan Cederholm - a great designer and developer, and an inspiration to me through his books and words, created a new logo for his personal site/business, which was then allegedly ripped off by a company called LogoMaid, and is being sold for $200.

(Image courtesy of aetherworld)

In the logo images above, Dan's original logo is on the far left, and LogoMaid's version on the far right.

The alleged ripoff is blatantly obvious, but instead of LogoMaid apologizing and removing the supposed copied artwork, a representative from LogoMaid has done the "unthinkable."

The guy has threatened to sue Dan, when it should clearly be the other way around. Not only that - the guy has flooded discussions on the topic with inarticulate and ignorant responses. Two spots I know of is this Flickr comment thread (probably the longest Flickr comment thread I've ever seen), and this Digg article. He's even created "dummy" user accounts, in order to pose as supporters for his very shady argument. How creepy is that?

Worse yet, many have uncovered that LogoMaid was also selling a slightly "tweaked" version of Apple's logo, which has since been removed from the site after these allegations surfaced.

Does this sound like a company you'd like to do business with? I would sure hope not.

Greater than the argument of shady business practices is what this does to the "design community." To have such irresponsible people try to profit off a designer's hard work is simply a crime. Unfortunately, this happens all of the time - and LogoMaid is just one example of this type of fraud.

Other links about this topic:

• Daring Fireball
• Brian Gilham
• Nathan Smith
• Godbit
• Technorati

Categories: Artwork , Fraud , Logos

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