Straw Dog Design

SAVE JON!

Suppose you’re a freelance designer. Now suppose you’ve designed a good number of logos and someone decides to steal all of your logos, rip the type off of them, and post them on the website of a stock photo company so they can make money. Then suppose the stock photo company sends you a bill for $18,000. And because that’s not an imbecilic enough move already, suppose the law firm representing the stock art website proceeds to call all of the your clients and inform them that you’re being investigated for copyright infringement, and that the logo you designed for them may have been stolen. 

Welcome to the current hell of New Mexico designer Jon Engle. Hit up his website for the full story. Admittedly, I don’t know the full story behind this, and I’ve never met Jon, but I feel that he’s being sincere in this…not to mention the vocal support of other designers who know Jon personally. As a designer, this irks me to no end. I wish stockart.com had done a bit of research before firing this away, this is putting them at roughly RIAA level at the moment. Please believe that never in a hundred years will I ever consider using stockart.com after this whole ordeal, it’s simply slimy, and disgusting. 

How can you help? Tweet loud, tweet proud > #SaveJon

To the asinine law firm behind this — I hope you wilt. I’m sure contacting the clients of a designer is somehow illegal in and of itself, especially when your case is extremely shaky to begin with. I hope your practice gets shut down. Say hi to Jack Thompson on the way out. 

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10 Shirts Every Type Nerd Must Own?

Post up on The Design Cubicle detailing 10 Type-Themed shirts that e every type nerd MUST own. Obviously, I totally dig the kerning one, but some of the rest fall a bit flat with me. I feel there’s got to be better type-clothing out there. Feel free to link to such in the comments.

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The Type of Faces I Like to See

Abuzeedo has a great post up of 45 Amazing Type Face Portraits. Some of them fall a little flat, but the majority of them are awesome and, thankfully, use different techniques. I love this one of Steve Jobs by Dylan Roscover. Check out the link for all the portraits.

via Abuzeedo

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Replace Ads with Art

Stumbled across a cool plugin for Firefox 3 that allows you to replace all the ads on websites with curated art images. I’m slightly opposed to add blockers because ads are where sites get the money needed to run…but at the same time, the ads of the world kind of owe us after “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’VE BEEN SELECTED TO WIN A FREE APPLE IPOD.”

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