Plagiarism

We’ve all heard it before, plagiarism should be taken as a form of flattery. Someone has decided that your work is so good that they cannot do any better and have therefore decided to take it upon themselves to right click > view source > select all and paste into the text editor of their choice.

This is a topic which I have always wondered how I would handle, if the truth be told I wished it was something that I would never have to find out. However, recently I’ve had to deal with this and I now know that I do not see it as a form of flattery at all.

I’m sure we’ve all seen some form of rip off whether it be Dan Cederholms problems with LogoMaid or more recently with Tim Van Damme’ business card website.

As a designer you will have spent hours wireframing, prototyping, crafting your pixels and countless hours tweaking small elements within your site until it is sitting perfectly.

To find out someone has copied your work, is a kick in the teeth. They have managed to recreated your site in a matter of minutes and with a few alterations to content and logo etc. they are able to fool other people into thinking that it is all their own work.

I’m not sure what I’ll actually do regarding this blatant copy, I think it would probably be best to sit on it for a while and see how things progress. If you have had a similar problem please leave a comment highlighting how you tackled the issue.

Sadly they haven’t hot linked anything so I can’t do ‘A Tim’ and swap an important image like the background for a picture of The Hoff.