Straw Dog Design

Save Jon: The Flipside

I was one of the many who jumped on the Save Jon bandwagon. However, I held off from emailing stockart.com, donating to defense funds, etc. till I saw how it all shook down, instead electing to raise awareness of the issue. Now that the initial hubbub has boiled down (including a front page Digg story that went to number 1, and netted over 3000 diggs and 300 comments), some counter-arguments are starting to surface from the design community. ISO50 Blog has a good roundup (with some tasty edits and double-edits) of the new evidence. By far the most interesting one to be is the one found on The Logo Factory. Why? Hit the jump to read on.

Based off my gut reactions to the images posted on The Logo Factory, I’m almost siding with Stock Art at the moment. Things aren’t looking good for Jon based off that post. As much as I’d like to hear a response, I’m guessing that if this is legitimately working it’s way through the legal system, Jon probably isn’t able to talk about it. Originally, Jon claimed stock art ripped off his logos, took the type off, and sold them. The problem I seem to see at the moment involves what I will now officially dub “Vector-Entropy.” That is: the loss of detail when vector-tracing another work. Basically, you would expect that someone who’s quickly vector-traced another logo will end up with a version that is missing small details and nuances of the original. That is what I expected to see in stockart.com’s “stolen” work, instead…I saw it in Jon’s.

To give you an example of what I mean by Vector Entropy, I yanked a random logo from LogoPond (this logo for Machisa Construction Services as designed by Mapack) and proceeded to quickly pretend I was “stealing it” in Illustrator.

Mapack’s original is on the left, my quick vector trace is on the right. As you can see in the highlighted areas, vector tracing (depending on the time you spend) can lead to muddled areas, with detail disappearing. This is what I would expect to see in logos that might have been quickly ripped off or copied.

The shots above are from the post over at The Logo Factory (Stock Art’s on the left, Jon’s on the right). The first thing that clued me in was the skunk’s eye, which was quickly followed by the football texture (triangular texture vs. solid form). Consider the following: why would someone stealing the skunk logo go back to add an eyeball, or someone stealing the football logo take the time to add the extra triangular shading? Perhaps to distance themselves from the original. However, were the person quickly grabbing the original logo, the eye or triangular texture is something that could be quickly swept over. It would seem that one could suspect the thief of simplifying information, not making it “needlessly” more complex. Just an observation.

I’m not pressing judgement, and I didn’t hunt down the logo pics, but I do think the evidence is–at this point–interesting. Obviously something is going down here. As mentioned before ISO50 has some good links, including ones that try to take a look at the apparent chronological progression of the happenings.

It will be intriguing to see how this ordeal continues to progress. Hopefully there is a definitive end to all of this. And hopefully that end is this: that it was some large-scale performance art piece/ARG meant to teach designers about copyright law.