NS logo

i like how the N and S are in the logo, great!

this looks great

favorite, good luck

really? this one won? I don’t want to sound like a sore loser, but seriously? this one? Is it me, or is this a rip off of mockup’s entry?

Never underestimate the naivet’e of the client…

ok i have rethought and re amended my comment …. Many congrats extended to Ollie i was lost for words and have found them.

however Im sitting here thinking whether the issue of plagarism should be addressed, but let me state first (and you have in writing) its not about the money its the spirit of taking part and most likely this money would have found its way into a charity coffer.

Maybe not total plagiarism ,angle, font etc, but I still am troubled with this,:

I happen to have a strange and very good memory. I am able to ‘think’ of an original idea, work it out, be very happy with result and still get that annoying ‘suspicion’ before final presentation that it might exist. Of course only to find out after investigating it, that I have seen it some months prior to ‘comming up with it’. I must have seen billions of images in my lifetime and take it out.

So when entering a competition, I feel I am forced to at least do a quick search to check that my ‘idea’ does not already exist somewhere, this is a family with a set of values or in effect a business where we can address matters before they hit points like this.

Not trying to be a jerk but does the point have merit and i feel a point Digger should address since competitions have rules. Or does it only matter if i put a fedex logo up. This doesnt matter to the client as he sees a unified unit but as the head of an organisation this is an internal issue. Im not worried about who’s logo looks better but one thing we designers should all be aware of and take notice of is intellectual property.

Lessons learnt now will save harder lessons in the future.

Dont worry not annoyed or angry but perhaps feeling violated

hey! ok, congrats for being the winner ollie. But your logo is pixel art, not vector. The latest requirements was all logos should be in vector. Not that it matters now, but the competition starter should have check all this before selecting.

I ’m surprised too but… congrats ollie

Yeah well done ollie

i think after what happen today, competition must be behind close doors. Only the competition starter can see the entries. Only at the end of the competition, the winner is revealed along with the rest of the entries. Congrats ollie.

was a complete surprise and lost for words, congrats. MockUp i can tell from your post you are a little p###d but i have to completely agree with your last paragraph. Originalty is the key to great designs. Moon think you might be onto something there

i also think moon is onto something… worth thinking about!

while moon’s proposal might limit plagarism of fellow contestant’s submissions, it will not prevent unethical designer’s from lifting ideas elsewhere. And at what cost? Removing all those logos from the site will diminish the LogoSauce user experience and require programming additional functionality into the site.

Since I’ve seen plagarism, to different degrees, in other contests on the LogoSauce site I cannot completely put all the blame on a 17 year old, Ollie. I assumed when I saw this elsewhere on this site that it was accepted practice. Maybe a way for new designers to learn? Many young, new designers copy or imitate others work as they learn, sometimes wholesale and sometimes piecemeal.

What concerns me about this incident was that there was no outcry about plagarized work prior to a plagarized design actually winning a contest. Limits need to be set to be sure but who will make the determination as to what constitutes whether a design has crossed a line?

I think the LogoSauce community needs to come up with a set of guidelines for all contests that are clear and concise so that there is a common understanding of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. Policing of the contestant submissions should be done descretely, with the intent to educate.

Teaching young designers ethics, the dos and donts, of the design business would be a very noble function of this site.

really suprised, there was so many great logos that this one i didnt even noticed, but anywayz kongratz to ollie

I think this is a disgrace. Now putting a speedometer or slanted letters is one thing because that would be considered a standard design element, but Mockups logo was absolutely original. Since he is the one who came up with it first, it is definitely plagiarism. Something is copyright once it is designed. Law doesn’t require that you file a standard copyright. This is honestly a legal issue and Mockup could sue the client that uses this similarly designed logo. I recommend The Little Book of Plagiarism by Judge Richard Posner. It’s very good reading.

****EDITED*****

Thank You George.. you’re a stand up guy. Good job.

Second thoughts for others.. if the potential client offers an email and a business plan, that means he wants you to communicate with him. He saw what he wanted, somebody said they could do it.. and he got it.

So… I dunno, in the future. Try communicating with the person who is supplying the $$$.

And yes competitions are just like spec work.. somebody can take them and change them slightly… and you loose. If you didn’t know that’s how spec jobs work.

Either don’t enter or don’t cry when it happens.

FROM NATIONAL SPEED:

Guys:

Relax. Below is copy of the email communication (which I initiated last Sunday) between David at LogoSauce and me regarding this issue. Hopefully this will clear things up. And in an effort to make sure we are totally fair, I’ll change the 250 to 500.

The fact is though that we preferred ollie’s logo over mockup’s, and so we chose it. I wish mockup had submitted another rendition or 2 for us to consider, but he didn’t. And as for ollie, he communicated frequently with us about what we liked and didn’t like (which all of you could have done) and worked hard, and therefore he was able to develop the design that we wanted.

And some of you may have noticed that Ollie lives near us—a fact that I believe is pretty irrelevant because of the internet. He found out about the contest because he knows my sons, and I didn’t know him before he entered the contest. His location had nothing to do with him winning.

Also, I want to acknowledge that I’m aware that there are more intricate and more beautiful designs that we could have chosen. Clearly this is the case, but we had to choose a logo that we not only liked but would also work on the broad number of mediums that we will be using it on. Some of the nicer logos would only work well on a webpage.

Lastly, if you guys have any specific questions or concerns, you can email me at george@nationalspeedinc.com. I’ll be happy to clear them up.

THE EMAIL IS BELOW:

From: George Taylor [mailto:george@nctaylors.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 6:31 AM To: ‘David Vaassen’ Subject: RE: Logo Competition….

David:

I have selected the winner, so when you get a chance I’d appreciate it if you would send me mockup’s contact information. Also, I’ll take you up on your offer to show mockup’s 2nd place prize in the blog. I’ve got another logo I would like them to take a run at, and that might help encourage some to enter the competition.

Thanks.

George

From: David Vaassen [mailto:david@logosauce.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 6:27 PM To: George Taylor Subject: Re: Logo Competition….

Hi George

Very generous of you George. Once you select the winner (just logon to the competition and select the winner). I’ll sned you the contact details of Mockup and you can liaise directly with him. we of course will be happy to write a post to the blog highlighting your offer. Unfortunately we have no function right now for second place.

regards

David Vaassen Logosauce.com (Beta) – Logo design, inspiration and information.

On 20/05/2007, at 12:54 AM, George Taylor wrote:

Mathew: I’m ready to pick a winner for our logo contest and the one we’re picking is ollie’s http://www.logosauce.com/logos/1570. However, it’s pretty clear to me that the idea for the basic design came from mockup’s designhttp://www.logosauce.com/logos/1349, so I would like to give mockup a $250 second place prize. How is the best way to convey this? Thanks for your help. George Taylor National Speed

“And yes competitions are just like spec work.. somebody can take them and change them slightly… and you loose. If you didn’t know that’s how spec jobs work.”

This is actually not accurate information. Spec work does NOT mean that someone can take your design. It is still illegal to take a logo and change it to make it yours unless it is changed by over 80%. There is a law called “Derivative Copyright” and it exists to protect artists work… be it spec or paid for. The artist owns the copyright ….including derivative rights once that art is created, even if the client pays for the logo art outright, THE ARTIST must give derivative rights up in writing to the client. The reason this law exists is because it’s not fair to an artist for some other artist to come along and just change their artwork and now call it theirs. The original artist has first refusal rights for changes on their original work. This gives the original artist the right to say that THEY in fact create the original art.

There was a case where an actual artist painted a mural on a portable wall and had it installed in his client’s home. Well that artist came back to get a photo of the painting some time later and found out that the owner/client painted over it. The artist sued for derivative rights (changing his art) and also damages and he won. The sad thing is that it was a gallery owner that was the client.

Word to the wise: Don’t change someone else’s work and call it your own. It may come back to haunt you in monetary and professional ways.

On the other hand, I commend George for compensating Mockup.

mockup, email me so that I can get you paid (george@nationalspeedinc.com).

Sorry for all the mess. I didn’t know all this chatter was going on or I would have cleared things up much sooner. There’s no forum on logosauce to post information like how we were handling this, and so I’ve been waiting for logosauce to email me your contact information.

As for what happened, we always planned on paying you long before all this BS (as you can see from the emails I posted on logosauce). And frankly I think all the talk about how Ollie stole your logo is a bit exaggerated. Clearly he took your idea of overlaying the N and the S, but no-one owns the idea of an overlay. And for Cwilk to compare what Ollie did to the artist who had his actual painting destroyed by a client is BS. Come on guys, Ollie started from scratch with an idea that he saw from a work that mockup did. And in the end, there are very few truly original ideas anyway. Look how many logos incorporated flames, wings, gears, flags, etc.

I was in the software business for a long time, and I can tell you that you cannot own an idea (unless you can patent a process) like overlaid letters. Remember the Lotus Spreadsheet (you guys might be too young)? Microsoft stole the entire interface and functionality and created Excel. Perfectly legal and acceptable.

Anyway, in the end, Ollie won because he communicated and worked with us to develop an idea of overlapping letters that worked for us. No-one else even emailed me to ask about what we needed. And frankly, Ollie’s is still not exactly what we want but we’re going to work on it.

So, is everybody still pissed off at us or can we move forward from here? There’s a lot of great talent/ceativity on logosauce and we were planning on having one more logo contest for a TV show called Mods that we’re doing on Speed Channel. Will we get flamed or will people submit logo entries?

Just let me know.

GT

Wow lots of comments from both sides.

I’d like to confirm that race4it made his offer to compensate Mockup to me via email before he selected a winner. He explained in the email that he liked Ollies design best but recognized that Mockups earlier design was the inspiration for it.

I congratulated race4it for his generosity – there was certainly no requirement for him to offer to pay Mockup.

Let me explain my point of view.

Nearly all graphic design, industrial design and art is derivative in some way. We can’t help it – we are brought up, all of us on a diet of visual stimulus from advertising, product packaging and the media.

Consequently as designers we absorb consciously and subconsciously snippets of design that often surface later in our own work.

The other concept that I come across all the time is the notion that very few ideas are unique. So many times I’ve had brilliant ideas – but having failed to execute them – see the exact same idea developed AND marketed (i.e. executed) by someone else. Execution is the difference.

Competitions on LogoSauce

1. The competition owner is the sole judge
2. Lets users make multiple entries (practice)
3. Users are fully aware of the conditions and participate at their own discretion
4. The competition is as open and transparent as I can make it.
5. Competition owners give guidance as to what they are looking for – so from the start all designers have the same parameters (or lack of). As time goes by I would expect to see designs becoming more similar rather than less.
6. Often the “bolters from the blue” – the truly unique designs win.
7. Some designers are good conceptually – while others are good artisans – the combination of a good concept and the skill of artisan result in the best design.
8. There is real value in having the entries exposed – so that designs evolve. Designers learn and feed of each other.

As an example – look at the KitzNthings competition. Many of the entries are very very similar – with the winner from Moon being a quite unique approach.

Personally I don’t think Ollies design is close enough to Mockups to warrant the plagiarism call. Congrats Ollie for the win, and Mockup for concept and George for the generous offer.

If we can have more competitions and competition owners like this then we should all be very happy.

Hi George/ Digger

Extending apologies in the matter, also have sent George and email of my intentions. This is just at the site and possibly a good recommendation, that we dont want to fall foul of all the traditional problems of communication prevalent in some “design companies”.

I think we are all human beings and rationale at that and while Digger feels that Ollies design is not close by Ollie’s comments its working off of a concept, the point i was making is that that is cool if just a mention to the other designer is extended, for me thats just a sign of mutual respect which i think avoids incidents like this. The communication aspect broke down and its amazing people such as George still exist and for that i commend you highly sir, im sure some of us have fallen foul of the pitch idea in the past only to see a very similar concept appear. Its a competition and this one has possbly been the most highly competitive on the site to date and between every one on the site it has been fun, so lets just keep it fun. I personally know that should the concept needed to be explored more by myselfor someone else, I would have said no problem.

In the case of Kitznthings, Digger, and i do hope im not speaking out of turn, I think that they are significantly different, yes on a same theme but each very very different. Wheras adding more of an angle and a font change is not really different. If you remember the adobe shop case a few years back where the picture had a few filters added and was still fell foul of the copyright laws. And this is only a competition with guys all submit something of which they have an emotional attachement to (plus egoes ;)) and a simple Do you mind if? would be nice.

Anyway water under the bridge, an Ollie I apologise and more reacted to your comment, for your information i have told George that it up to you guys as to whether you get the full amount or agree to have 250 donated to a charity, I totally understand that perhaps i was not privvy to a conversation and out of the loop but George has acted with the utmost integrity and again George i commend you.

Mockup/Kai

Mike:

Sorry for the slow reply—it’s been a bit crazy around here the past couple of days. Anyway, no need for you to apologize at all. It was just a bit of slow communication on my part, and some friends of yours enthusiastically defending one of their own. Not a problem.

BTW, I couldn’t help but notice that you’re from Dubai. Awesome place from what I’ve seen (never been there), and probably has more ultra exotic/fast cars per capita than anywhere else in the world (not to mention a pretty incredible ski slope in the middle of the desert). I’d like to open a National Speed there one day. How about you? Do you have any interest in cars?

George