Hey, that looks familiar...

This past Monday I ventured over to LogoPond.com, a website where designers post logo designs they have created for review or just to show off their latest work. After a short while of looking through pages of logos I instantly recognized an image as one that I created about six months ago. It turns out that a member of the site named Julie Kapral, AKA JulieK, a 16 year old "designer", decided that she was going to take credit for my work. And take credit she did. With seemingly jubilant excitement she thanked people for posting compliments for the illustration she claimed to have created.

I posted in the thread and in the site forum that I was the real creator of the work. A rebuttal was quickly posted by JulieK stating that she did not steal the work. Then admitting she did not make the illustration but got it from a book and then implying that perhaps I did not create the illustration either and probably used the same source that she got it from. After promising to show a scan of the book she got the illustration from the next day she was not heard from again. I later went on to find other work on her site that was created by other artists. It's almost certain that every piece in her portfolio was plagiarized. Her work has since been pulled from LogoPond.com and her personal website is no longer up on the web.

The worst part of this is that She actually sold some logos on a website where pre-made logos can be purchased. These logos were most likely other designers work and were probably trademarked by the companies that are originally using the designs. That means that there are some companies out there that can potentially be sued for copyright infringement even if they did not know the work was plagiarized.

Do I feel bad for calling out a 16 year old? Hell no I do not. I wonder if that's her real name, if she's really 16 or even a girl.

Skateboards...

In my younger days, when I would do nothing but go skateboarding all summer long with my friends, at least once a day we would end up talking about how it would be the ultimate coolness if we could somehow make our own skateboards with custom graphics on them. Well, It took a while but now it's possible to have your own custom deck without having to be sponsored by Powell Peralta or Santa Cruz...

I've seen other websites where you can upload images to put on skateboards but this is the first time I actually tried it. I created an account on Zazzle, www.zazzle.com/echesketch, and have used some illustrations I've done and slapped them bad boys on some wood. Sooner or later I'll be ordering one of these and will go out and shred like it's 1985.

I've been ripped off... UPDATE

I'm writing this update since I still get e-mails from people asking me what ever happened with the situation where some web design company earlier in the year stole a logo I designed and used it as their own.

After being informed that the logo I designed had been blatantly ripped off I contacted the owner of the company, (which is actually just a couple of guys) via email and asked them to stop using my design. The following are the e-mails we exchanged after that.

THIEF:
We've never heard of you. You approach me like I do not have an
established company. Please refrain from threatening me like a child.


ME:
Established or not that is my logo you are using. I did not just start my business the other day either. Are you claiming that you created the logo? Or did you hire a designer to create your company logo who most likely took my work and sold it to you to make a quick buck.


THIEF:
We have never seen your logo or heard of your company. I am being falsely
accused.


After that I got my lawyer to send a cease and desist letter to the thief and within a week the entire site was taken down. The last time a checked they had a brand-spanking new site, which by the way I quickly found out was created by using a template from one of those template websites.

Missing: Carlisle Thundering Herd logo...

As I walked down the ice cream isle last night at the grocery store I saw a display of shirts and hats for the local high school sports team. I thought I would check it out since I did the logo for the school a long while back and I wanted to see what they finally did with my design. Unfortunately the logo I did was nowhere to be seen. Instead I saw another logo, clipart perhaps, that I had nothing to do with. At that moment I may have looked cool, calm and collected on the outside. But internally I was on the verge of breaking into a conniption fit unlike any that has ever been witnessed by anyone in the state of Pennsylvania!

Flash back six years while I was still working for "The Man". I somehow managed to get volunteered to create a new sports logo for the local high school by my boss at the time. What started out as a simple redesign of one logo eventually turned into a huge project with multiple versions of the logo for different uses, separate icons and logo combinations for each team sport, desktop backgrounds and all sorts of other extra things... A massive amount of work went into designing the new logo and everything else that went along with it and after about two months the finished product was pretty good. Since completing the project I have not seen the logo anywhere. Not on team uniforms, at events, on the school website, nothing! I did hear rumors that a friend of a friends cousins girlfriends moms friends neighbor thought she may have seen someone with a sweater that had the logo on it. I have yet to be able to confirm that though. The designs apparently got sucked up through a rift in the Spacetime Continuum and are currently floating around in the 8th dimension somewhere never to be seen again.

El Macho!

Eh, every once in a long while I remember watching wrestling on TV when I was a kid in Puerto Rico.

Logos published...

Three logos I've designed have been selected to be included in the upcoming "Logolounge, Volume 5" book from Rockport Publishers. The logos that will be published in the book will be the Burn Creative logo for my graphic design business, the echesketch logo for my illustration site and a logo for Rhino Settlement Services.

Robot...

I bought a Wacom Intuos3 tablet a few weeks ago. With a Wacom tablet you can reproduce traditional mediums like pencil, oil, watercolor and you can use it to create vector work as well. This nifty new toy is not as easy to use as I thought it would be. Not that it's impossible to use but you can't just jump right into it and paint away. Maybe the fact that I've avoided painting like the plague my entire life is not helping me any. I'm more accustomed to the flat color, vector work I've been doing for the past ten years. So, I have to work on traditional painting techniques now to get things to look right.

Anyway the image of the robot is what I've come up with. After tinkering around with with it for the past few weeks this is my first attempt at creating something halfway decent.

Do you like clowns?

Long lost and found. I finally found the disk I saved this file to yesterday in some old boxes in the attic after losing it about eight years ago. This was one of the first illustrations I made using Adobe Illustrator.

ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?!?

80's rock in all its glam'o'rrific goodness.

I've been ripped off...

So, I get this interesting e-mail this morning from someone who posted an ad on craigslist for a logo design project. Apparently they also received a response from a company whose logo is suspiciously similar to one in my portfolio.

I created this logo for PAK Photography about four years ago or so. They either lifted this logo from my site or maybe from some website where I've posted my work in the past. Either way you can see that they are identical designs. Although, they did use their superior creative skills to change the gray color to blue.

You can also view the original as well as other logo and design work on my graphic design site www.burncreative.com.

Stress Poster

In my career as a graphic designer I've heard a lot of things from clients. This poster highlights some of the more common things I and pretty much every other designer has heard at one time or another.

This poster is available as a PDF and desktop background format in the "downloads" section of my website, www.echesketch.com