Friday, August 21, 2009

Buffalo Terrorized by Graphic Design Thief

The back cover of this week's Artvoice (Buffalo's alt weekly) is causing some controversy. The major elements of the page have been shamelessly lifted from a poster designed and produced by my friends at Hero Design Studio. If you are going to steal someone's work you should probably steal from someone whose office isn't four blocks away. The person who did this must be very young and not understand the rules of the game. Hero isn't too happy. The other element in the layout was appropriated from something I designed, see below.

The Artvoice back cover

Hero Design's original show poster for Iron & Wine

The Buffalo skyline used behind Hero's tree and leaf, looks very much like a distorted version of the skyline I designed for Mark Goldman's book City on The Edge (Prometheus Books 2007). The corners are sharper than in my original and some of the buildings have less detail, I suspect that someone used mine as a template and made a new version in Illustrator.




5 comments:

mark said...

You are right it is probably someone young that has no clue. I have seen it with interns we have had, copying designs, downloading things from the web and using them, using any old font ey can get for free.
th
What the hell are they being taught in school?!

Elizabeth Switzer said...

You're right, probably someone young who doesn't know any better..

Personally I'd like to give Artvoice a piece of my mind on this, but since they did this to you and to Hero- I thought I'd mention it first. Any thoughts?

Unknown said...

I think everyone at AV is pretty mortified about the whole thing. It was basically one person's really stupid mistake that wasn't noticed by the others. I guess what I'm saying is that it wasn't a conspiracy. I'm not planning on making much more out of it. It will be interesting to see what course of action Hero takes.

Elizabeth Switzer said...

I think you're right- i'm certain it was not a conspiracy. I just want to be sure that they understand that their readers noticed.

When I mentioned it to a few people today they all said "oh, i thought hero was working with artvoice..." perhaps the point has already been made.

I can't help it though, I'm an righteous letter writer by heart!

Unknown said...

I think they have been getting plenty of negative feedback from readers! I have been told they will be printing an apology in this week's issue.