This impressive cosplay of the character Kuchiki from the anime Bleach can be seen as one of those ads that pops up all over the place… you know the types… The original picture can be found on google using the tagline “bleach cosplay toothbrush” (And I HIGHLY recommend that fans of this particular anime should take a look themselves, while possibly temporarily disabling the adult filter.) I don’t have definitive proof that the owner wasn’t contacted and permission wasn’t gained, but I seriously doubt that the company went through the trouble of tracking the girl down for something like that.

If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery then we are very happy to share this with you. We’re about to launch a brand new portfolio tomorrow, couple of small content updates and layout amends aside, and just going through our analytics we came across Katia Convents.

Profission site is top, Katia Convents site is bottom.

Using imagery and code directly from the 2005 Profission site, and even using our google analytics urchin, the site goes as far as having a profission,png logo, but the copyright is altered to suit the new site.

This version of our site is archived here
Katia Convents is here
Here email address is atelier@katiaconvents.de

We see this as a wonderful and poignant epilogue to a site that has served us well for five years.

Tim

YTWWN SAYS: This is a pretty big call to make, not against artist using photos as reference but if this post is true, that she claims it was her husbands hand? Also to note she is legally blind which often means they can see somewhat but very poorly… really don’t want to beating up on a blind person just because they may have traced one image….
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Blind artist Lisa Fittipaldi, claims that she became blind in 1993. She has appeared on Oprah and in publications such as People Magazine promoting her paintings. What caused me to question her story was the fact that a painting that she first made public in 2001 looks identical to a photo taken of Angelina Jolie’s hand that was included in an article about the actress in the December 2000 issue of Premiere Magazine. An image of the painting was included in a profile of Ms. Fittipaldi in the October 15, 2001 issue of People Magazine. I have included scans of images from the articles for your perusal. Please note that when both hand images are placed on top of each other, the outlines match up perfectly. It does not seem possible for this to be a mere coincidence.

Left: Angelina Jolie's hand holding an apple. Right: Painting by Lisa Fittipaldi - The artist claims that this is a painting of her husband's hand.

Looks like someone was feeling a little uninspired when they made their website. It’s just madness to rip off such a well known/visited design!

I wonder what Matt has to say about this?

Hi,

We’re Merix Studio – webdesign & web development agency from Poland.

We’ve launched a microste called World of Merix not a long time ago. Site itself got pretty popular (featured in quite many CSS Galleries and Web Design blogs). Soon after launch we tracked couple companies who used our concept as well as source code (html/css/javascript). Fortunatetly we managed to have plagiaries removed from the internet but we thought it would be good to keep (and show) samples

Here we go:

Original

“made in China” (previously available on tun2.com – removed by now)

“made in Italy” (previously available on sicilianweb.it – removed by now)

Good luck with dealing with thieves.

I came across the new Selfridges shop home page, and within 0.002 secs I realised this site is way too close to the Cravendale I saw last year. Not only is the look similar but the functionality of the site, the way you can throw content blocks around, the rollovers, the hand drawn character and the Selfridges bag in place of the milk bottle. Pretty damn shameful. I’m not sure who is responsible for this horrible copy, but if anyone knows they should be named and shamed. The original was made by Outside Line.

Original: http://www.milkmatters.co.uk/

Rip Off:  http://www.selfridges.com/

Wow. Sometimes I think designers assume they can steal from smaller companies because – let’s be honest – who’s ever going to know, right? But when that small company gets bigger, suddenly a lot more people can see how you ripped them off. Check out these logos:

From L to R: Plan B Ad Agency, Blooming Color, and Plan B LLC in Dubai.

The first one was created over 10 years ago at an ad agency in Chicago, Plan B [the agency alternative]. The next one was “designed” years later by a suburban Chicago printing company called Blooming Color. And today I found a third Plan B logo that’s curiously similar to the first one for a company out of Dubai! I can definitely see how there would be different companies with a prominent “B” in their logo, but these treatments are just WAY too similar to be a coincidence. Don’t you think? Lower case b’s in nearly identical font styles slanting to the right inside the right half of an ellipse? I guess if you’re going to lift a logo it ought to be from a creative ad agency, right?

Check out Blooming Color’s website here or send them an email.

You can also see the ripoff logo for the Dubai agency here.

Found this while browsing some css galleries today. This is so obvious its almost embarrassing:

Catchmail is an email marketing web application for sending out html emails: catchmail. This site has been round for a while and is constantly featured on design inspiration lists.

Lemon squeezy, offer the same service but seemed to REALLY like the design of catchmail lemonsqueezy email

Have a look for yourself:

But wait, there’s more…the guys at lemon squeezy email are so good, they even stolen one of catchmails clients!

And it also seems they named their CSS stylesheet in a bizarre homage to the original catchmail website. Nice touch guys!

On Facebook there’s a game called SuperPoke! Pets on Facebook. You create a pet, take care of it, and can buy things for it’s habitat. You can purchase toys and stuff. On thing that poped up today was the Mystical Pandorable Lizard which looked strikingly similar to me for some reason. It reminded me of a pet you get in the RPG World of Warcraft, the Sprite Darter Hatchling. Coincidence?

Vera Brosgol, an illustrator and story artist on such films as Coraline, has apparently been copied by Hot Topic or Pierce the Veil, or both. I suppose when they were going over this with their tracing paper and crayons, they thought that making it more homophobe-friendly and all-around way lamer might place it outside the realm of copyright infringement. Shameful on so many levels.

Vera’s original image:

[link to original]

The copy:


[link]

This news came from a post on Vera Brosgol’s own twitter feed at http://twitter.com/verabee.

Update: It seems this might go under speediest resolution ever. Vera contacted Hot Topic today and was already told that they will pull the shirt from their site and stores starting tomorrow (via twitter). This could possibly be the work of a dishonest designer, but who knows. I hope they will also stop all orders of the shirt that may have already been placed. Though perhaps they can send one to Vera as a souvenir?