Similarity of independedent outcomes = polygenesis.

Plagiarism = not acknowledging known sources.

**

With simple execution, it’s more likely that polygenesis will occur, and be apparent.

Therefore, simplicity is in danger of banality, and, ironically, vague distinction.

**

Ignorance is not really an excuse for either polygenesis or plagiarism—for the true professional—who should know what’s “out there”.
Searching is more and more fruitful, with powerful recognition analysis tools such as MyFonts’ “What the font?”.

more often than not I think polygenesis becomes plagiarism when a designer makes a choice to end their creative process before reaching a unique viewpoint.

It seems more rare that someone would blatantly plagiarize a work. Although, that negative conclusion is the first we usually come to when similarities are spotted.

I once designed a logo that we failed trademark before putting into use and later found a competitor had adopted a very similar mark with an additional “t” in the name and an uglier typeface for a similar product. The date on their trademark was listed before our first use, so it would have been difficult to press plagiarism, but the process we went through to create the logo made it difficult for us to think it could have been polygenesis. I do my best to try and think they didn’t deliberately copy our mark and lie about the trademark date, but the thought gets the better of me sometimes.

@Nick
Looks like an evening at Roycroft’s got you talking epigrammatically!

I would think that search companies like Thompson & Thompson could be helpful.

http://compumark.thomson.com/jsp/index.jsp

ChrisL

I think it’s silly to assume ’unique’ is a prerequisite to good design. Plagiarism is bad, yes, but so it forcing uniqueness when it’s not needed.

Plumber = pipe wrench = best solution for probably a majority of plumbers that need a simple icon to show up on the side of their van. It’s great to come up with that one unique solution, but sometimes it’s not needed, and is even a bad thing.

In terms of student work, the issue compounds itself when a professor tends to use the same project over and over again each semester. It can quickly saturate a market’s young portfolios with a lot of the sameness.

These days you post a logo online and within an hour you’ll have 10 people pointing out similar concepts. That’s not plagiarism. That’s just coincidence.

it’s only plagiarism if a copier is aware of the copied.

for two designers to independently come up with similar solutions is definitely not plagiarism, nor is it all that unusual. it’s called a design trend. part of the zeitgeist.

Nick, are you referring specifically to typeface design when you say “ignorance is not really an excuse” for polygenesis, or design in general? If there is a tool like “What the font?” that is designed to compare two designs from within a somewhat limited set (all typeface designs), I can somehow see your point.

But, as a graphic designer, do you expect that I - as a professional - know every logo, custom type design, identity program, etc. done WORLDWIDE, and from the past XX years, no less?

jarrod

...got you talking epigrammatically!

One damn thing after another :-)

Plagiarism is knowingly taking another person’s design and willfully copying it with or without minimal changes. Some solutions are heavily odds-on favorites to be done by coincidence. If two different paperclip companies end up with a logo that looks like a paperclip, I am not a bit surprised. It is a designer’s duty to at least suggest a search be done before a new logo is put into service. Branding or logo design is not just a matter of drawing skills and a quick idea-hatching session. Granted, this is done every day by bargain so-called design firms. If an idea comes too easily, chances are that someone else also thought of it. Branding is about finding what is unique about the client company and portraying it in a memorable way while maintaining brand separation from competitors. That is not to say that 3 car rental firms can’t all have a car-like image as a brand. Each one should have enough unique about it to identify the parent company easily, though.

ChrisL

“do you expect that I - as a professional - know every logo, custom type design, identity program, etc. done WORLDWIDE, and from the past XX years, no less?”

That is why there are search companies out there that for a few hundred dollars, can search out possible overlap.

http://compumark.thomson.com/jsp/index.jsp

ChrisL

so then would we say that this is ok? Is this a design trend or just laziness and ignorance.

http://usablebrands.de/files/blog_pdf/the_brand_gap.pdf
page 133-4

Also, initially you can search for free
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=e6pi7j.1.1

“so then would we say that this is ok?”

No, it is not ok, it is also not criminal. It is just not what a professional should do. A professional should know their client’s company, their products and services, and their position in the market. They also should know their competitions position and image. The idea is to position your clients brand to be, distinctive, desirable, and easy to work with. This means doing due-dilligence in seeing what they are up against and steering them away from potential law suits due to your work with them.

ChrisL

Might help to look at some older symbols (like the swastika) that emerge from different cultures and consider that some patterns may even evolve from a physiological model, etc.

Gosh, Nick, I was just planning to go to your site and buy some Czech lottery tickets! Do they come with sausage or is that a different purchase? :-)

ChrisL

The question was,

>... is it plagiarism (w/ or w/o intent) ... when two designers on different sides of globe are given an similar project (i.e., an identity for a plumbing company), and they just happen to come up with identical solutions......then what do we consider the outcome?<

the answer is, in 9 cases out of 10, the ’identity’ will be a new font identical to Frutiger.

So yes, it’s plagiarism, yet not of each other but of Frutiger.

OK, it’s plagiarism. The next question is, is it intentional or unintentional?

There are two answers. Every designer who has ever copped Frutiger tells you they came up with nearly the identical design by chance. The other answer . . . . .

So what’s interesting is the extent to which Helvetica is the only vernacular sans recognized by most business people who still, forty or so years later, find something wonderfully forward and original in Frutiger.

So then the question becomes, why, if you need an entirely ’fresh’ look for goons, is Frutiger still the only safe way to deliver it?

And let’s just remember that ’goons’ isn’t just businessmen with zero design & technology experience. Both Adobe and Microsoft have fallen into this popular trap.

The peculiar thing is how terribly limited the trusted typographic vernacular is.

Bill.
I think the larger the organization, the more likely they are to go with safer—supposedly tried-and-true—solutions. in other words Frutiger (or Myriad) :-)
Also, large organizations don’t need as much separation as smaller ones. They are more known just by nature of multiple exposure and volume marketing. Also, design-by-committee or corporate signoff lists take a bigger toll on large organizations. The least objected to solution wins.

ChrisL

Every designer who has ever copped Frutiger tells you they came up with nearly the identical design by chance.

I agree with Bill.

I don’t believe it’s possible for even very good type designers to accurately recreate well known designs—without visual reference to the original. Ergo, similarities that occur are not the coincidences of polygenesis, but the result of careful comparison, with decisions being made as to just how far to diverge from the original to legitimize the similarity.

I challenge other type designers to make a Frutiger “a” from memory, right now, and post the results.
I just did it (but won’t show yet).

>I don’t believe it’s possible for even very good type designers to accurately recreate well known designs—without visual reference to the original.

Sign-painters (John Downer for example) do this all the time - John did a live demo of this at TypeCon Seattle recreating Helvetica without reference to the original.

Cheers, Si

I think Nick and Si are both right. We all have an idea of the Frutiger a, but to recreate a facsimile as faithful as . . . name your clone . . . . I wouldn’t want to try it out of the air. On the other hand, it’s Downer’s profession to be able to do this. He might be able to do it with Helvetica, after a lot of practice, but not with for example Syntax — or with Fontesque to take it to an extreme. In any case: he’s trained to be able to replicate these faces fairly accurately - - the rest of us aren’t — perhaps not even our own. Jeff Level used to get quite a charge out of repeating an encounter with Zapf during which Zapf proved — it was considered an exceptional feat — that he could draw Palatino accurately, from memory, at 12 points. He prefaced this with the immortal remark, ’I vill now draw for you ze Palatino!’

I do think that a lot of us could draw from scratch a nice Frutiger-ish a, and use it as the basis for a nice new sans serif. But the people whose Frutiger clones are nearly indistinguishable from Frutiger have, I think obviously, gone a lot further than that.

I’m sure if I practised drawing Frutiger, working from reference, I’d be able to do a pretty good facsimile, as per JD and Helvetica.

But it’s simply not possible to draw a typeface accurately solely from memory, without “learning the piece”, developing muscle-memory through study and trial-and-error practice.

My challenge stands: draw a Frutiger “a” from memory, without reference.
I’ll show you what I came up with, once we’ve had a chance to work on it.

Not being experienced in using FontLab’s drawing tools, my first effort was far too embarrassing to disclose — but even if I was using Fontographer, which I’m much more comfortable with, my effort would be pathetic. I could do it more easily on paper. Anyone else?

>Searching is more and more fruitful, with powerful recognition analysis tools such as MyFonts’ “What the font?”

Oh, another possible tip - post an image of the suspect font to the Typophile ID forum - and see what the typorati come back with.