Rip off

Cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden seems to have ripped off a nonprofit organization's logo for its new Britney Spears fragrance "Believe." The similarities are obvious; just check out this comparison from younggogetter.com.


The original uses Arial or Helvetica (if I'm not mistaken, I'll check later) while EA uses Century Gothic. The fonts are similar enough to untrained eyes, but what's more striking is that the color scheme is the same.

Which begs the question: how can a large company, with teams of designers on its payroll and a legal team to check trademarks and copyrights miss this?

Of course we should not rule out parallel creation. The EA designers might have come up with the logo independently. The font is classic modernist while setting the "i" off with a different color is all too common. The colors may have come from the Pantone color trend predictions. In other words any one could have made it up; it's not that brilliant.

The lesson here is simple: do a basic image search after your initial logo idea sketches. It doesn't matter how great your design looks or if you created it on your own, if someone else is using it (or using something similar enough that lawsuits might arise) then it's useless to you. Yours or your clients' lawyers should also practice due diligence and check registered trademarks.

More on intellectual property in a future post.