
In design, everything has been done before - uladzislau
https://medium.com/@fvo/your-logo-is-copied-710ac4604258
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bambax
This post presents numerous examples of contemporary designs (>2000) with
their early equivalents (<1975).

EVERY SINGLE contemporary design is credited to a company (or to "unknown").

EVERY SINGLE early design is credited to a named individual.

Isn't this part of the problem? Companies play it safe; their committees
(voluntarily or not) navigate towards the known, vote for things they have
seen before.

Would you hire a company to write a novel or a symphony?

If you want original design you should hire a person -- a professional with
strong opinions, not a big firm.

~~~
lacaza
I'm not sure that's the real problem. Good firms just try to have the best
people in their roster (best creativity and skills). These designers have the
same approach a single person would have: figure out the company's identity
and come up with a solution that represents it best. On average, you would
probably get better results by hiring a firm than a single person.

I suspect the real problem is related to the ongoing simplification trend that
logos have been through for the past decades. Take apple's or pepsi's logo for
instance. This minimalist trend results in simple shapes, and there is a
finite number of simple shapes out there. So when designing a logo according
to this trend(as everyone is doing and have done in the past), you will
probably end up with something similar or equal to something else. Not many
dimensions to play with.

(Sorry for my English)

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kwhitefoot
So 'design' is now a synonym for 'logo'?

In such a restricted space it isn't surprising that you can find a lot of
similar pictures. One of the highest priorities for anyone designing such a
thing is simplicity which reduces the amount of variation available so you end
up with collisions.

~~~
italophil
I see the Medium post titled 'Your logo is copied', which is a better
description.

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basseq
The article focuses on stealing vs. copying, but both of those terms imply
awareness of the source material. There's a grey area of "copying" where you
design something while being unintentionally influenced by something else.

But I suspect most of the derivative logos in the article are instead examples
of similar outputs from complete unique, separate, and unrelated processes. In
other words, DesignStudio may have never seen or encountered the Azuma Drive-
In logo when developing the AirBnb logo. That's not copying: that's
happenstance.

With logos in particular, there's a finite universe of picograms and shapes,
particularly when you're building off a letterform. There's bound to be
collisions that are due to _neither_ stealing nor copying.

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everyone
I've talked to people in arts/humanities who attest that its impossible to do
anything original. Examples of earlier original things or, for example,
current scientific discoveries of brand new phenomena, did not sway them.

_ Annoying. I assume certain college courses are drumming this belief into
them (Also a habit of terrible verbose / waffley writing)

