3 ms·
Andrew Wilkinson is constantly freaking out over design similarities and rip offs. In some cases, the designs are not even close. In others, such as in this cas
by brandon272 17y ago
Andrew Wilkinson is constantly freaking out over design similarities and rip offs. In some cases, the designs are not even close. In others, such as in this case, they are very close. In either case, I don't think that these constant public tantrums are ever effective at accomplishing anything positive.
What Andrew did accomplish in this case was that he ensured that Mozilla will likely not become one of their clients, even though it was clear Mozilla considered them to be a good firm, and would have possibly sent them work in the future.
The professional thing to do in this scenario would be to contact the parties involved to see what is going on and discuss the issue, including any concerns you have, directly and like adults. It's wrong to assume you understand someone's motivations when you haven't given them an opportunity to explain themselves, especially when you go on to type up a scathing blog post about them in which you publish private e-mail correspondence between yourself and the party that you are criticizing.
- antidaily 17y agoWeird assumption - that Mozilla liked them and would have given them work in the future if he would not have complained. Though, I agree that it probably could have been resolved out of the public's view.
- brandon272 17y agoWhy is it a weird assumption? Their blog post shows an e-mail from Daniel (the person they are lambasting) that says "Your company has first-class UI/graphics design chops and I will certainly keep MetaLab in mind when bidding out future projects that require such services."
- lmkg 17y agoDon't take that at face value. It's standard corp-speak boilerplate. All it means is Mozilla wasn't burning bridges with the rejection.
- brandon272 17y agoBoilerplate perhaps, but generally if a company is willing to rip off your designs for use in their own internal concepts, I would take that as a sign that they like what you are doing.
- jeremymcanally 17y agoWhy wouldn't they just rip it again? :) I mean, I think this whole thing is stupid, but if they've shown they'll do it once, what's to stop from doing it again? Why would they hire you after that? The whole scenario is just weird.
- mbreese 17y agoNo one is saying that they shouldn't have complained... what some are arguing is that they should have complained directly to Mozilla instead of the Internet at large. By making their complaint (valid as it is) so public, they've risked any possibility that they could get design work from Mozilla in the future. A quick email to say, ?Hey, we noticed that the design of this tool that's in development was copied from our design" would have done the trick. Instead of riling up designers online, this could have been handled much better.
- Semiapies 17y agoMozilla are lucky it was a blog post and not something from their lawyer.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]