Design Rip Offs

Is it a form of flattery, mild “inspiration” grabbing, or just blatant commercial theft?  The subject of design rip-offs keeps bubbling to the surface.

Larissa Meek blogged about rip offs here, citing a direct but “crappy” copy of the AgencyNet web site.

Elliot Jay Stocks also recently blogged about the rip off of one of his designs and got down and dirty by naming and shaming the culprit.

Jacob Cass exposed 22 rip offs on his blog in February and promises to dish more dirt.   Here is an example from his blog of a ripped off Christian Louboutin design:

Googling “design rip offs”  lists 780,000 posts on the subject.

So what to do about it?

Legally, it’s fairly difficult, time-consuming and costly to go after a rip-off artist.  Most designers don’t have the financial resources to take the legal route, and most “perps” aren’t worth persuing financially.

The best way seems to be to raise merry hell online.  Naming and shaming someone who has blatantly copied a design appears to be the most effective way to get a design taken offline and discourage a repeat offense.  That said, you need to be very sure that the person in question has copied your work as naming and shaming could become libelous itself.

When all is said and done, perhaps the best approach was summarised by Jefferey Zeldman “Don’t worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.”

It’s the Design Police

This cracked us up.

You can download a PDF of these cut-out-and-keep Design Police stickers here.

Mistakes in Icon Design (courtesy of Denis Kortunov)

Denis Kortunov wrote a great post recently titled 10 Mistakes in Icon Design.  Guru…!

In addition to being a really well written post, he has great examples, some of which I have copied below.

Key lessons are:

• Keep it separate. Make sure that your icons are clearly differentiated.

• Keep it simple. Not too many elements in each icon. Minimise variable perspectives and shadows.

• Keep a style. Have a unity of style in your icon set.

• Keep it familiar. Don’t confuse users by being too original.

• Keep it Global. Don’t use local (national) references.

• Keep out text. Text in icons doesn’t translate.

KISS

New Release Today

We are creating a new release today.

One or two new features to highlight:

• The proof page has a new highlighter tool. This automatically turns the nib of the drawing tool into a thick yellow line at about 25% opacity. Ideal for quickly highlighting text. Thanks to Alec for requesting this.

• You can now make comments on proofs in Cyrillic text. Thanks to Alexander and Peter for this requeust. Удача.
• The Feedback forum has single sign-on with the main ProofHQ application, so once you are signed in to ProofHQ you automatically log in to the forum.

After that there are about 30 small bug fixes or feature enhancements that just make everything that bit smoother.

We’ll be doing a bigger release in four weeks with some exciting and innovative new features.

Have fun, and keep the feedback coming.

How to make software for marketing

Jon Miller at Marketo writes a great blog called Modern B2B Marketing. He just posted some great thoughts on what it takes to create software for marketers. He talks about lead management software (Marketo’s area), but his thinking applies to any software for marketing, including collaborative review and approval for design.

The pain and expense of buying packaged software has meant that marketing teams have not automated as quickly as other business areas e.g. sales, accounting, supply chain management. Marketing departments have not historically had access to the large capital budgets needed to buy big-ticket software licenses and marketing agencies only spend what their clients give them. Added to that, the complexity of large IT projects does not fit with the way that marketing works, with short marketing cycles and a lifetime of looming deadlines. Finally, marketers are aesthetically aware and let’s face it, traditional enterprise software has not been pretty or easy to use.

The introduction of SaaS (software as a service) has helped make it easier for marketers to fund software purchases. SaaS usually offers monthly or annual subscriptions, which can be funded out of opex (operating expenses) rather than capex. SaaS licenses can also be scaled up or down quickly, so marketers have flexibility to deal with changing budgets. Web 2.0 has led to the improvement of software interface design, which has increased adoption by marketers.

Jon sums up seven attributes of successful B2B software as :

1. Intuitive interface: Most marketers didn’t start their careers as programmers or project managers. Complex tools with Visio-like user interfaces and pseudo-code programming environments may be powerful, but they’re hard to learn and end up requiring dedicated resources and/or significant professional services. Marketers need an intuitive system they can learn quickly – think of how many marketers know how to use PowerPoint.
2. Great design: Let’s face it – marketers are visual people, and how software looks and acts and feels matters. Just take a look at the iPhone.
3. No upfront costs: Marketing departments typically have significant monthly or quarterly program budgets, but large one time payments can be hard – especially if it isn’t planned for months in advance. The same marketer that can commit to a $25,000 agency contract (paid monthly) without batting an eye needs CxO approval to justify a technology investment of similar size.
4. Free trial: Seth Godin says that most businesses aren’t price sensitive; they are value and risk sensitive. They need to justify to the people they work with that they didn’t get ripped off, and they don’t want to have to apologize to their boss for buying the wrong thing. A trial is a great way to get comfortable that the solution really works and meets your needs. If a vendor can’t offer a free trial to serious prospects, it’s probably because their software takes too long to install or is too hard to learn without significant training.
5. On-demand: Software as a Service is a godsend to IT-starved marketing departments. It means you don’t have to buy any hardware or install anything, the system maintains itself, and new upgrades are delivered automatically.
6. Great support: A great solution is much more than just the software you get. To be successful, marketers need easy ways to get started, access to tips and best practices, and responsive customer support. Of course, success shouldn’t come with a price tag, so you shouldn’t have to pay extra for these services.
7. Powerful and complete: Sophisticated problems require sophisticated solutions, and B2B marketers shouldn’t have to compromise functionality to get great design, usability, and fast implementations.

Meetings about meetings

Just read and commented on a post by Brad Feld and it made me think how we manage communication here at ProofHQ.

Brad was saying how easy it is to waste time by calling a meeting about something rather than just committing an issue to email (or IM) and getting it resolved.

At ProofHQ we have a team working in London, Kent (UK), Poland and Ireland. We work together every day, but because we are dispersed over so many locations we can’t have meetings. Instead we rely on IM (Skype), email (Gmail) and the occasional call (Skype) to get things done.

Of course this can create problems and there are times when we wish we could spend more time face-to-face, but one thing we are good at is getting issues discussed and resolved fast, rather than waiting for “the next meeting”.

Innovation

‘Nuff said

Release 0.7 is available

We released version 0.7 last night.

It contained a number of small bug fixes and a new Contacts function.

The Contacts function is an address book of people in your organization and that you have sent proofs to in the past. You can use Contacts to manage which email addresses appear in the chooser tool when you start typing an email address in the To field of the Create Proof page.

Contacts will also be used to manage Groups – a new feature coming soon!

Please continue to provide feedback and report bugs. We are squishing them at a rapid pace!