New Joe Boxer “The Puck Stops Here” kids’ line looks awfully similar to something we designed back in 2004. How similar? Judge for yourself
News of our work getting knocked off isn’t exactly uncommon around the shop. Usually we are notified by other designers, eager to protect the reputation of our industry. This one’s a little different. I was having lunch with an old friend when my iPhone notified me of a new message. It was from one of our designers at the shop – Steve R – who had seen this in the Sear’s Christmas Wish Book. A new line of Joe Boxer kidswear called “The Puck Stops Here“. Oddly, the logo used on the T-shirts, underwear, pyjamas and bath robes looked startlingly similar to a logo he had designed way back in 2004 for a now-defunct Hockey Entertainment company. I was intrigued so the Mrs and I dropped into our local Sears outlet (where the line was festooned all over the childrens’ wear department) and picked up samples of the entire line (let me tell ya, Joe Boxer stuff ain’t cheap). We both had to admit, there were some similarities.
How similar? Let’s take a look. Here’s the original design (circa 2004):
Here’s the Joe Boxer line:
Granted they’re not exact doppelgangers (Joe Boxer version has a dog’s head and the hockey stick is elongated) but it’s safe to say that one of these designs owes parts of its heritage to the other (notice the stars and the hockey figure). Now, how do you suppose the Joe Boxer designer would have come to notice our logo? Maybe it’s because this logo was featured in our old Daily Logo since 2005, and for years (up until we 301′d a lot of our pages last Spring) this was on the front page of Google when someone searched for “hockey logo”. Course, this could all be coincidence and the result of a happy accident.
Or not.
* With apologies to Jimi Hendrix
Update:
As pointed out by Andrew in the comments section, the bulldog head part of the design appears to be an istock illustration.
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Even the number of stars in each area is the same. hmmm….
My question is did they steal the bulldog head image from iStockphoto, or did they pay for it???
http://www.istockphoto.com/sto.....g-head.php
There is no question where they traced the rest of the “design”.
My next question is did Joe Boxer have a designer “design” it, or was it crowdsourced???
Well, judging by the number of people whose work (nice catch, BTW) ‘inspired’ this little gem, I would say it was indeed “crowdsourced”. Alas, the ‘crowd” just didn’t know they were being “sourced”. And in typical crowdsourcing fashion, nobody got paid and the “client” made out like a bandit.
Wow – that’s really bad! The uniform is element for element exactly the same. Just blatant plagiarism. So I guess you can’t do anything about it as copyright belongs to client who bought logo?