Thou shall not rip off
Last week, Otty my trusty senior designer that leads the Dictionary.com design work sent me a website I never seen before, http://mydictionary.myresources.com. The shocking thing is that bears an awful resemblance to our Dictionary.com homepage!
Errr, rip off? The funny thing is that they tried to change the colors around and removed some content to lessen the rip-off index. Maybe Otty has a screenshot of what it looked like two weeks ago because it was even more blatant.
If that wasn’t enough, yesterday, my old colleague Dahveed Gomez-Rosado, who’s VP of User Experience at Lithium, twitter’d this:
“The most flagrant and cynical act of plagiarism I have ever witnessed in the Web. Ever: http://ow.ly/gByA“
Perhaps Kevan at his Turnit.com gig should figure out how to do anti-design-plagiarism.
Wow, two plagiarism offenders in two weeks for me!
Gracepoint After Five of course uses a modified version of the Agregado theme, which was masterfully created by Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson of Category4. I couldn’t swallow the original pink feel of Agregado, so I tweaked the Hues in the Photoshop file they provided everyone and bam, we were good to go. Agregado is awesome and Darren/Matt deserve all the credit. Not us.
Tagged as plagiarism, rant + Categorized as Design
I’ve been following @wordexplorer on Twitter now for a while, and one day, @MyWOTD started following me, so I checked it out. I couldn’t believe how similar the MyDictionary.com website was to my old friend, Dictionary.com. They were so similar, I could have sworn they were by the same people. In fact, it was a Google search about the two sites that landed me here.
Anyway, I still continue to use Dictionary.com. Its words of the day are far more interesting, plus it includes IPA pronunciation guides. MyDictionary.com may have completely ripped off the design, but at least their content has a way to go before it could ever rival the original.
It looks like CNN’s new web design is similar to http://mydictionary.myresources.com.
Do you suppose they took some liberties?