Imitation, Flattery and Identity Theft
Unlicensed content is used every day while the copyright holders do what they can to prevent it. It’s an endless cycle that can’t be stopped but the importance of creating and sharing should outweigh any fear.
However, sometimes the infringement is so obvious, you find yourself asking how anyone could think it was a good idea. I wrote about my involvement with the TinEye brand before. It’s something I’m proud of which made for an entertaining and shocking morning after reading that the TinEye robot was rebranded as a bug finder in his very own video game. Stealing an established brand/mascot/logo from a company designed to find copied images might not be the brightest idea.
It’s not my battle to fight but the game developers response will be interesting.
Your Photography Website
This post is for the other photographers – in particular, those in business.
I have had this blog post half written for more than 6 months and could never pull the trigger on the publish button. The topic felt too specific for a generalized statement and because of that, something didn’t feel right to justify a blog post rant. However after an interesting discussion tonight with onOne‘s education manager Brian Matiash, it gave me that needed incentive to complete this post because I’m not the only person who judges ones brand partly based on presentation. There are companies like Brian’s and surely future clients browsing portfolios also judging you on how much consideration was applied to the website.
But first, lets be honest. Everyone is hopefully more critical and focused on the details when it comes to our own industry. Chefs with food, contractors with houses, doctors with health, etc, etc, and designers like myself with websites. We are all trained to care about different things and rely on others to fill in where we choose to focus less attention.
Two summers ago, I had a small presentation at a PPOC (Professional Photographers of Canada) seminar on web technologies to discuss the elements of a reliable website. Although much has improved since then — there is still more work to be done. Poorly implemented websites are still common and with all the photographers in the world so focused on perfecting their images, they often settle for presenting them in a substandard way.
So in a world where art, design and images are so very much subjective, here are some details to consider:
Branding the Reverse Image Search Engine
In 2003, I attended a conference and watched a presentation that demo’d some pretty amazing image recognition technology. The idea of searching for images with other images was a new concept for me but as this technology advanced and we (silverorange and Idée Inc) became friends, it was not long before we were working together.
Fast forward to 2010 when the brand TinEye (a website designed to search for images with images) was being developed and prepared for the world stage, I was given the opportunity and challenge to create a mascot, a logo, and an identity for this service. This brand needed to represent speed and efficiency on top of being friendly with a great personality. The service was magical meaning a simple wordmark was not going to be acceptable and that was when the concept of a robot was born.
Drawing a Robot
TinEye is a fun brand but a mysterious one. While fun — it’s not childish. It’s fast, but comes with a level of mystery. Most of us could not explain how the TinEye technology works. We just accept and expect that it does. So how can we illustrate all of this with a single mascot brand?