Copycats - It's all about the info.

"Hey, these guys seem to know what's up with this whole logo design deal. Let's use their stuff. Yay - pretty pictures too!"

One of our most heavily visited area of our web site is our technical area where you'll find a wealth of geek-speak information as it relates to logo design. File formats, conversion and resolution issues - all assembled from many years of 'in the field' experience'. This is the second version of our library - we had to change the original illustrations as they were we 'adapted', along with our technical information by some of our competitors in an attempt to convince their clients that they knew as much about logo design as designers at The Logo Factory. In the new versions, we used our trademark characters Pixel and Vector as well as logo examples from one of our own web sites. We figured that no-one would use illustrations that featured OUR trademarks and OUR web address. Wrong again. Not only did the good folks at Logodesignaid.com ("everything you need to know about logos") publish every word of our technical material, but also the original illustrations featuring Pixel and Vector. What these good folks miss is that publishing logo design info is one thing - knowing the material intimately enough to WRITE technical manuals is another. And it's pretty safe to say that is you have to resort to 'stealing' other design companies technical material - you're not really up snuff when it comes to knowledge about the field.

"Just type over The Logo Factory name and we're all set!"

When one of our site visitors read the branding section of the website belonging to some outfit called Reaction Grafix, the copy seemed vaguely familiar. When we read it, it was a little more that vaguely familiar - it was lifted word for word from the font page of our web site. Now, not to belabor a point, but if creative people are going to market creative services, shouldn't they use original methods? And if you're a would-be client, and if you're impressed with the work on a particular web site (even the copy writing) don't you want to deal with the people who are responsible for it, rather than the people who have lifted it?

Yeah, that's what we thought.

"Next time, probably better if we lose The Logo Factory name..."

When we're writing web site copy, we make every effort to write material that is informative, easy to understand, to the point and search engine friendly. It is, like all of our work regarding The Logo Factory Inc., a labor of love. It also takes time and effort - which as we all know, equates to money. So you'll have to excuse us as we get miffed when folks decide to simply cut-and-paste this material onto their site, claiming it is as their own. Take this little gem - some printing company who decided that our add-on design copy, more specifically, our letterhead design section, was perfect for their web site(!). Trouble is, when they pasted in the copy into their pages, they neglected to change the instances of our name, so The Logo Factory is featured in the body copy of several of their pages. Now THAT should clarify things for THEIR clients.

Nice people - shelling out free design tips and all...

The nice people at New Zealand's 'E Logo design' must really think a lot of their visitors. After all, it's not everybody who has a downloadable .PDF with lovely logo design tips. How magnanimous. How utterly selfless. Trouble is, their 'tips' are a word for word rip from The Logo Factory logo design tips page (they removed the more esoteric references). Funny thing though' - these guys are claiming copyright on the piece which means one (or both) of two things - either they have a different way of dealing with copyright in New Zealand, or the folks at E Logo Design are yet another logo design company who's knowledge (and respect) of copyright is a little murky. But hey, if they want to pass out our tips, perhaps they might also want us to design logos for their clients?

"Of course we're The Logo Factory. You found us in Google, right? "

As odd as it may seem, some folks even go as far to place entire pages of our site on theirs, hoping that it will improve their search engine ranking, or to masquerade as The Logo Factory on the search engines. Sometimes this leads to fairly ridiculous search engine results - (left) The Logo Factory and someone posing as our studio (by using our pages and web tags) right underneath our listing on a Google search. Regardless of what the copy sez - that ain't one of our sites. And if that doesn't work, some good folks even pay for Google Adwords, using The Logo Factory as a keyword phrase, triggering their site whenever clients and designers search for use. Guess the thinking is that if someone's searching for us, they'll find their link instead. Though it occurs to us that if someone is searching specifically for our shop, they're not about to fall for the old switcheroo. Clients and designers are generally a pretty smart bunch.