Let’s talk about copying for a moment. Ripping off someone else’s hard work, and using it as one’s own. Let’s start by me saying that I basically have a hard time taking anyone seriously who says they’ve not been properly credited in these modern times. I don’t believe for a moment that any one person is qualified enough to explore a single idea to the fullest. I believe in the sharing and free distribution of ideas, and the idea that once an idea is freed into the world, it is free. For the betterment of the idea. The following set of images (and the one above) were found and set up by designer / artist / internet person / retired design professor Bob Caruthers.

Above: Nikolay Petrovich Prusakov (1929); Elizabeth Ackerman (1999)

Step back naw yall, things might be getting messy. What’s the great thing about this internet age? The open market, one where you can get your works made into wonderful creations like prints, computer cases, shoes, stickers, carvings, hamburger stamps, basically anything! What’s the bad thing? It’s a lot easier for your ideas to be released before you want them to be. And then you know what happens. Tumblr, ffffound, and dropular.

Einstein once said, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

The pairs of images in this set are similar in one way or another. Some are more similar than others and some are just SIMILAR without being influenced by the other.

They are presented for no other reason than to shed some light on the creative process.

-BCaruthers

Catuthers has also been so kind as to put all of these images up on flickr so that you might interact with them that way if you wish. I’m certain I’ll be throwing several of these up on the WFDJ tumblr too, spread the love!

IMPORTANT NOTE: this post and its contents are being discussed heavily over at GigPosters.com – I encourage everyone to join in.

And while you do it, think about how far away these similarities are from one another, then think about how far they are from the obvious go-tos like Andy Warhol and Shepard Fairey (who, incidentally, is on this list already,) then think about if the cave dude who first wrote on the wall with dung “HEY, that is MY idea, don’t you DARE write on the wall with dung.”

Bang. No modern world.

BONUS: if you look carefully, you’ll notice several works here from designer Paul Gardener of Flora Fauna, whom we covered in [March on Thru, Flora Fauna]

Movie Poster (1965); Concert Poster (2010)

Designer Unknown (c. 1940s); Music Promotion (2008)

Space Stamp (1961); Concert Poster (2010)

Chinese Propaganda Poster (ND); Concert Poster (2010)

Stamp (1960); Concert Poster (2010)

Concert Posters (2007); (2009)

Halftonedef.com (2007); Jonathan Harper (2008)

Frederick George Cooper (1918); Concert Poster (2009);

Pelican Ink Ad Art (ND); Biking Poster (2009)

Otto Treumann (1962); Political Poster (2008)

Yusaku Kamekura (c.1975); Concert Poster (2009)

Lanny Sommese (1987); Ignition Print (2009)

R. Deutch (nd); Felix Sockwell (2009)

Concert Poster (2009); Stefan Kanchev’s Operetta State Theater Logo (1969)

Ellen McFadden (1968); Designer Unknown (2007)

Jim Datz (nd); Concert Poster (2009)

Concert Poster (2009); Advertisement (1965)

Bob Gill (1962); Concert Poster (2009)

Robert Lachenmann (1937); Concert Poster (2009)

Solve Sundsbo (2008); Concert Poster (2009)

Josef Muller-Brockmann (1960); Shepard Fairey (2006)

Czechoslovakian Matchbox Label (1950s-60s); Concert Poster (2009)

Hatch Show Print (1944); Concert Poster (2008)

Abram Games Poster (1956); Concert Poster (2008)

Saul Bass Movie Poster (1965); A Concert Poster (2003)

Le Chat Noir Poster (1880s); A Concert Poster (1996)

Russian Anti-Drinking Poster (left); A Concert Poster (2008)

Idea Magazine (1955); Concert Poster (2008)

Maurin Quina Poster (1920); Concert Poster (2002)

Two Ben Shahn Illustrations (c. 1950s); A Hurricane Katrina Poster by Wink (2005)

Two Zwicky Cats by Donald Brun (1950); Concert Poster (2004)

Clockers (1995); Movie Poster by Saul Bass (1959)

Original Ward Schumaker Illustration (date unknown); Concert Poster (2005)

A Pearl Jam Concert Poster (2006); Two E. McKnight Kauffer Posters (c.1919)

Aldo Calabresi’s Original Ad (1960); A Polish Poster (ND)

Lanny Sommese Poster (1987); Two Variations on the Theme (N/A)

Mad Magazine Cover (1974); Concert Flyer (1996)

Robert Miles Runyon Illustration (1961); Concert Poster (2003)

Ikko Tanaka Poster (1958); Concert Poster (1998)

Concert Poster (2007); Goscie Poster (1973)

Japan Air (1924); Concert Poster (2001)

Jerry Smath Illustration (1961); Concert Poster (2008)

Waldemar Swierzy Poster (1973); Concert Poster (2001)

Funny Girl Playbill (c. 1964); Concert Poster (2008)

Tadashi Ohashi Exhibition Poster (1970s); Concert Poster (2001)

Faustino Perez Poster (1968); Arab League Poster (2007)

“Ruth the Acrobat Carnival” Poster (1941); and a Concert Poster (2008)

At the bottom here I’d like to once again mention that these matchups (most of them, all of them) were researched and connected by Bob Caruthers. This very cool man is a retired Professor of Graphic Design at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas. Born and raised in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Big props to him, and I hope this project is continued both for those people who consider it a crime AND those who consider it part of the building process.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies deconstruction category.

• Posted by É um barato o Cassino do Chacrinha… « O2 Aktuell | 03.09.10

  [...] este super apanhado do blog World Famous Design Junkies dá um banho de informação quando o assunto é o conhecido [...]

• Posted by Entre la inspiración y la copia descarada | QuintoH es·Tu·Dio2 | 03.10.10

  [...] Vía | worldFamousDesignJunkies [...]

• Posted by El mensaje es el medio - World Famous Design Junkies » Extreme Graphic Design Plagiarism | 03.10.10

  [...] World Famous Design Junkies » Extreme Graphic Design Plagiarism 10Mar posted by Alex               filed under Uncategorized via worldfamousdesignjunkies.com [...]

• Posted by Inspiração ou Plágio ??? « Além das idéias | 03.11.10

  [...] via [...]

• Posted by Links de Sexta (19/3) | Vida Ordinária | 03.19.10

  [...] do Grêmio tocado no Guitar Hero Humor | Como não contrair AIDS (por Ricky Gervais) Design | Os plágios mais descarados do Design Games | Uma imagem que desafia que sabe tudo sobre games Humor | Como alguns filmes deveriam [...]

• Posted by PLAGIARISM. - Friends Make Prints | 03.19.10

  [...] This article makes me feel a whole lot less guilty about the poster I designed for my Undergrad Show at Utah State University last year (right). In my opinion I think I definitely turned it into my own by using the layout created by the ever so inspiring Aesthetic Appartus (left). I used Picasso drawings of bulls (my school’s mascot) instead of blind contoured horses. After reading the World Famous Design Junkies article on design plagerism, give me your 2 cents. Am I bad a person? Not once did I claim this piece to be fully original. And I don’t want to say that everyone should copy or that it’s ok. There’s a difference into what you make into your own and what you copy exact. Most pieces shown in the article are ridiculous. I repeat, RI-DIC-U-LOUS! [...]

• Posted by Extreme Plagiarism | 03.25.10

  [...] Has this already been posted? I dunno. I did a search in the forums but didn't find anything. World Famous Design Junkies Extreme Graphic Design Plagiarism Reply With Quote   + Reply to Thread « Previous Thread | [...]

• Posted by Berlin Festival Presents: Crystal Castles at Ritter-Butzke | Blitz Gigs.de - Berlin's Best Gig, Concert & Entertainment Guide. | 03.31.10

  [...] make music that sounds easy to make. Sure, they might have borrowed a lot of their stuff, but who doesn’t. Chip-tunes stuff with nice samples and beats, it’s indie punk for the electronica [...]

• Posted by T H O M A S / / P A Y N E / / B L O G | 04.02.10

  [...] interesting article on plagiarism in design, here. [...]

• Posted by virgin graphics // SALT IN MY EYERONY | 05.07.10

  [...] Here’s an article at World Famous Design about copying and intellectual commons and etc. I find this discussion interesting at this particular junction in my life because I often worry as I prepare my portfolio that I am somehow in capable of producing an original and creative image. I’m a pretty ravenous consumer of visual culture, and I really worry that that fact, in conjunction with my insecurities as a young artist, make me really susceptible to copying other people’s trademark aesthetic–even if it’s totally void of malice, a sort of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” sort of thing. Granted, some of the works shown at World Famous Design are more visual reference (I think) than actual copyright infringement, though I suppose visual reference, by definition, is copyright infringement. [...]

• Posted by flowdavid (flowdavid) | 05.13.10

  分享 http://tinyurl.com/244x5ej (澄果事件？) 其實這樣的事倒是屢見不鮮─ http://tinyurl.com/y8ny7ha (Extreme Graphic Design Plag… http://plurk.com/p/564919

39 Comments

• Posted by ward Schumaker | 03.08.10

  Certainly I never gave anyone the right to reproduce the image of Junior Brown (shown above) and I can bet that the New Yorker Magazine (for whom I made the image originally) gave no rights either.

• Posted by Kupi | 03.08.10

  Sometimes, it’s just an accident (maybe???: Robert Miles Runyon Illustration (1961); Concert Poster (2003). Sometimes for gig/concert posters, it’s just a fun influence. Other times, it’s just a blatant rip-off.

• Posted by Chris Burns | 03.08.10

  Ward Schumaker! What an honor to have you come by! I believe that example is one of those “that’s just not cool” situations where the designer basically lifted it and pretended it was theirs. Harshness.

• Posted by jim datz | 03.08.10

  I made that piece in 2007. Someone in the Gigposters community emailed me about the cut-n-paste shenanigans. Already had words with the offender. He apologized. A lot. Case closed.

• Posted by Chris Burns | 03.08.10

  Datz! Your works are fantastic! Brilliance! Glad to hear the case is closed.

• Posted by Eleanor | 03.09.10

  Some of these seem like a deliberate nod to the original iconic design (Clockers/Anatomy of a Murder, Funny Girl/concert poster.) Sometimes there are honest mistakes, we are exposed to so much imagery at such a rapid pace these days that stuff gets lodged in our subconscious and comes out in our work. Other examples just seem like blatant copying and are kinda shameful – especially if the designer thinks the source design is so obscure that no one will know…

• Posted by Matheus Dix | 03.09.10

  Freak!

• Posted by Steve Carsella | 03.09.10

  Some of these are blatant rip offs, (like ward’s and the one with the house on a cliff in the corner) A lot of these are nicely done homages… or clever re-appropriations.

  As artist we should allow some room for creative reproduction. At the end of the day it’s better to be good then original.

• Posted by Mono | 03.09.10

  It’s not a coincidence the most of the copies are concert posters, and that’s just plain ’cause the poster art is stalled at these “copy-paste” era, wher anyone with photoshop is a “designer” and just consolidated artists (and labels) pays for their art.

• Posted by Jeff Matz | 03.09.10

  The Against Me! poster is mine. It was a very deliberate homage to the original movie poster.

• Posted by Chris Burns | 03.09.10

  gg i thought so

• Posted by art chantry | 03.09.10

  ok, here’s the bigger question: where does post-modern appropriation stop and plagarism start?

  in a simply B&W PC-stupid world, you begin to find that everything starts to turn grey. my position is that EVERYTHING is plagarism to a degree. we don’t learn to walk by invention, but by copying. hemingway didn’t INVENT the words he wrote with. he used the same words that his contemporaries and his his forebearers did.

  further i take the extreme views of EVERYTHING being a copy of something (i can usually put the truth to that with a little research) and, conversely, i think that NOTHING is plagarism. the ‘von dutch’ school of thought was the simplest. he publicly stated that he held NO copyright to his work. when it got out there, he felt it was fair game. basically: eat all you want, i can make more.

  as a capper, i want to point out that i wasn’t copying that MAD cover (with that Makers poster), i didn’t even remember it (by the way, your repro is in b&w. you lost 99% of the design by using that crappy b&w version. is that plagarism? or not? what if i used your repro of that cover. is is still ‘stealing”? but, it’s virtually not the cover. it’s so confusing.)

  in reality i was stealing the image from a punk poster/telephone pole flyer whipped up by lonnie stacato, a manager/relative of the makers. he did a wonderful poster using that partiular finger image. they wanted to use it on their cover, so i xeroxed off their poster and used it straight across. it wasn’t until a couple of years later somebody pointed it out to me that it was MAD cover. it’s actually the legendary kelly freas’ hand. in my opinion, that makes it even BETTER.

  so, at what point does it become plagarism. in a culture that reproduces so many generations that the original authorship is lost, does it become “unPC” and “non-original (what? original? i’m not there is such a thing.)

  i think that if you are going to post s big self-righteous sight like this, you need to get REAL EXACTING with your definitions. otherwise, it’s a mess.

  the only person i thought i was copying was lonnie stacatto. who knew?

  i think this stuff is important, but your presentation is a little far sighted (aka myopic.).

• Posted by art chantry | 03.09.10

  one last thing. this ain’t art. it’s graphic design. it’s a collaborative form. we make client’s look good. we take their products/ideas/input.visions and present it to the world through this medium of image and type. and advert. we don’t follow our muses to create original artworks,. we make cultural artifacts – advertisements that outlive their function and become these weird bits of archaeology. not art. artifacts.

• Posted by Chris Burns | 03.09.10

  Thank you for stopping by AC! I DO love the things you do! I am glad you took the time to make a more exacting definition of this, too, as it’s such a hard subject.

• Posted by Ryan Hageman | 03.09.10

  Put it all in the public domain and imagine the great things that could come out. If only there was a utility that brought it all together. http://search.creativecommons.org/ is convenient, but just think of all the amazing and amazingly horrendous things that a wiki-esque model could produce.

• Posted by Steve Burke | 03.11.10

  Great article, I was hoping to see the cbs logo and the story behind the creation of it.
  Keep posting.

• Posted by Barbi | 03.11.10

  A stamp labeled “Russian Space Stamp (1961)” is actually a Hungarian stamp. There’s a difference. I wonder how many other works were mislabeled. Therefore the credibility level of the article is questionable.

• Posted by Brandon | 03.12.10

  more than half of these are concert posters.

  concert posters often use famous imagery or other people’s work because it grabs attention, and they often do it to be ironic.

• Posted by L. Venell | 03.16.10

  Not to excuse plagiarism (because there is no excuse for it), but maybe if people stopped demanding so much design work for free, they would copy other people’s designs a lot less. I would imagine it’s much easier to justify phoning it in when you’re not getting compensating for your time and ideas anyway.

• Posted by Chris Burns | 03.16.10

  Most important comment yet.

• Posted by Marina Córdova Alvéstegui | 03.16.10

  - http://www.posterpage.ch/div/news09/n091128.htm

  - http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5551512&id=179504196180

  - http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5551513&id=179504196180

  - http://www.grafitat.com/2010/03/16/prohibido-copiar/

  It is a looooooong subject, isn’t it?

• Posted by ward Schumaker | 03.19.10

  Just a couple notes: in my view whether something is “art” or “commerce” depends more upon how I perceive it than the original intention. There are not many illustrations I consider art but someone like Gary Taxali comes along and does an illustration that meets my definition of art (purely subjective, something about how long I’d be willing to have it up on my wall, or if I’d allow it to be hung on my wall in the first place).
  second: a few years back, a work by my wife, Vivienne Flesher, was stolen off the cover of CA magazine and used on tens of thousands of bottles of wine. We only found out about it through a friend who ‘congratulated’us. We sued and around our house the money she got became known as her “Petite Guggenheim grant”, allowing her to spend much of the next year doing personal work.

• Posted by JDRE | 03.23.10

  Another one!

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/shypsi/4441939487/

  http://newgrass.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/bauhaus-1923.jpg

• Posted by Lil Tuffy | 03.26.10

  The Brun poster above is credited. It says “Brun” below the cat on the gig poster.

• Posted by check this | 03.30.10

  http://aimeewilder.com/pattern/ < third pattern from right on bottom row (original)

  and

  http://www.leannekerwin.co.uk/ < click TFL Moquette link

• Posted by gerardo baston | 04.23.10

  everything is made of everything, that’s the time we are living…

• Posted by Zsolt Sandor | 04.24.10

  Hi

  excellent article, but there is a small error,

  the russian space stamp is actually a Hungarian stamp

  thanks
  Zsolt Sandor

• Posted by Joann Sondy | 06.15.10

  WOW! I suppose being aware of when/if we cross the line from emulation or admiration into blatant plagiarism is elemental to finding one own’s style. Throughout history, the apprentice copied the masters as lessons but this is inexcusable.

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