A few years back, when I was developing our File Format Survival Guide, I had a real problem developing a series of graphic ‘chiclets’ to illustrate the various characteristics of logo file formats. The chiclets had to be small, tell the story of fairly sophisticated concepts, while being funky enough to be visually pleasing. Wasn’t an easy task either. Struggled with the graphics in Illustrator for weeks before finally getting them to a point were I was happy (you can view them at the bottom of our vector file format page). 
That was back in 2000, and the little graphics have served us well on our various websites ever since. Imagine how thrilled I was to find that some outfit called Viva Logo Design liked our little chiclets so much, they decided to plaster them all over their web site in their file format explanations (they also pinched our copy, and while it’s still not cool, this wasn’t as difficult to assemble). I also figured that if these characters were up to pinching our artwork, I wouldn’t put it past them to be, ahm , inspired by some of our logos as well. Well, true enough, after rummaging throught their portfolio, I found this example for some outfit called Schnell that looks remarkably similar to this design that we created back in 2000 for Datelvision BV, a German networking company. Amazingly, (or more accurately, brazingly) these Viva folks have copyright notices on the pages, claiming that ‘all rights are reserved’. Funny, I don’t remember giving away any rights they can claim reservation of. I always wonder what goes through these people’s minds. As they’re supposedly a ‘professional’ logo company, don’t they realize that this isn’t cool? Or do they figure that nobody’s gonna find out? Not that finding this stuff is terribly difficult. I use a nifty service called Copyscape that scans the toobz for duplicate content that’s been pinched off our site. It’s free, and helps monitor who’s helping themselves to our website content. Alas, this hackery has become somewhat of a regular occurance – so much so that we have a Copycats section dedicated to it. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times – copying other people’s stuff is decidedly not cool. And they wonder why the online design industry is such a mess.
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