Thursday, October 6, 2011

Come on, really??

If you're a fan of Old Tom Foolery, you've probably seen this Typestache poster we started selling last year, designed by our friend, the one and only Tor Weeks:



























Well, yesterday, we stumbled across an Etsy shop run by a woman from France. Now, we're not claiming we invented the idea of laying things out in a grid, but she could have at least changed the font:
























But wait! When you zoom in on one of the images, what are those hats named?


























That's right--the exact same names as most of our Typestaches. Oops. Looks like someone forgot to cover her tracks.

It's one thing to be inspired by someone else's work, but it's another thing to blatantly borrow from it. Would have loved to see this lady put more of her own twist on these posters, rather than just plop some new images into an existing design she found on our Etsy shop. That's just lazy.

But enough of our whining. What do you think? Flattery or Scammery?

8 comments:

Erika {Delphine} said...

Not flattery ...iIckery.

Anonymous said...

"Imitation is the sincerest form of laziness."

A local agency just posted a message talking about how great their new work for a major retailer was. After watching it, I got immediately pissed. They took a tagline I wrote for another company — the same tagline they asked me about when I interviewed at this place — and slightly tweaked it. They had the guts to actually bill a client for work they just ripped off from me. The world is full of shameless hacks.

Signed,

Ar-chives

Ian Kalman said...

Wait...that's a very famous hat poster. It's been around since '86. I always thought the mustache poster was a parody of that.

Of course, I'm kidding. They totally ripped Tor and you guys off. That stinks. I think it's much more scammery than flattery. Even though scammery is not a word.

tor said...

I thought no one knew about the great Hat Poster Renaissance of '86. I'm a fraud!!!

Can anyone explain to me the hat poster though? Why is Helvetica a 'Ms' who wears a weird bowl hat? We all know the God of all typefaces is a man. Is this lady kidding herself?

JanieHoffa said...

Very lame on her part. She's someone who has no ideas of her own (but wishes she did.)

I worked at an agency recently where a CD got laid off and promptly proceeded to pull work from our server and upload it onto his (secret) professional website as his own work. Unbelievable. (For clients he wasn't even CD for.)

He's at Donor near Detroit now.

Julie said...

Did you guys confront her about it? I don't see the hats on her Etsy site anymore!

Deborah said...

When people steal others designs and do not understand the underlying premise, it doesn't work. The moustaches make sense. The hats do not.

Anonymous said...

The suck saga continues.

http://us.moo.com/design-templates/luxe/business-cards/pack/typographic-moustaches.html

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