Naming anything can be difficult, be it your company, a new product, or a new baby. With the latter my only criterion is that the kid can spell it in kindergarten and live with it without getting beat up in school.
The Name Inspector is a blog run by a linguist and professional namer, meaning he knows his stuff and gets paid for it. Although the featured names are analyzed after the fact, it still is good reading, providing insight into what factors should be taken into account when thinking of names. He also has the occasional "big picture" post that gives helpful tips like "10 tips for naming your company..."
Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
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.
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.
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