Lately I have noticed some designs being stolen and I just wanted to point out a few. How do people expect to steal a design and go unnoticed? Especially when they are stealing the design from a well-known source. How can you claim to be a designer and just steal someone else’s design? Isn’t the reason for having a site is so that you can show it to people? I’m not sure why you would want to show something you have stolen to someone when there is a chance you might get caught and people will look down upon your name.
Toby Powell has been ripped off twice in the past month. The latest one, Derrick, had actually left Toby as the author in his copied stylesheet. Toby and a few Twitter friends started writing to him and within 30 minutes he had taken down his site and apologized to Toby.
The worst of these two is Osama Ahmed who actually accused Toby of stealing from him! It is obvious that Toby’s design was the original by looking at the silhouette on the page which matched Toby’s image. A bunch of Twitterers started contacting Osama and told him to take down the design. He eventually realized he wasn’t going to win this fight and actually asked Toby if he could help him design his new site! Haha! The design remained for about a month as Osama was working on redesigning (or stealing) his site.
This has happened among others like Fuel Your Creativity and there have also been posts on it such as this one. I just wanted to highlight a few and note that the design community on Twitter is pretty strong and you most likely won’t get away with stealing a design nowadays.
Feel free to leave a comment and mention any other design thievery you have seen.
17 comments to design thieves
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Wow, that’s a blatant rip!
People steal Tim Van Damme’s site so often its ridiculous.
Hey thanks for writing this post, and if it wasn’t shannon and the twitter community and the help everyone gave me i’m sure I would have had a lot more problems trying to get people to take down their crappy copies, so a message out there for all tinterweb rippers! Twitter is watching!
thanks again shannon 
It is nearly laughable to think that all of these people actually try to get away with it. It is crazy how quickly fellow designers locate stolen work and make the problem available to the design community and then how quickly the problem is addressed! We don’t play any games in the design community folks! Haha
That is *really* sad. Obviously the thieves know a thing or two about design and coding, so why spend time ripping off someone else?
@Toby – No problem, we’ve got your back
@Antonea – Yeah it’s nice that they have a lot less chance of getting away with it now that everyone is so connected
@Eric – Yeah exactly. People claim to be designers/developers and then just steal the designs and code. Doesn’t really make sense.
It seems as though the guy who originally ripped off Toby Powell’s design has also ripped off another site. Guess he just doesn’t care that people seem to keep noticing.
original – http://sursly.com
ripoff – http://www.b3ckstage.com (after you hit go)
There are 4 more to add to mine, only one is still active however: http://www.nazmulalam.com/delta/
Thanks for drawing attnetion to this.
@Tyler – no problem, I’m sure it’s really frustrating!
I also like how the link you just sent actually says Tyler in the URL after hitting GO haha
Wow, with so much creativity floating around (and so affordable at that) whats the purpose of stealing? That’s beyond lazy!
How hard is it to get this kind of situation rectified?
Read your article yesterday… and stumbled upon this today… http://tinyurl.com/d2pc2t
Someone should create a list to expose these leeches…
This seems to be a continuing trend for non-creatives
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His site http://www.jasonreedwebdesign.com/ design and copy was used.
http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/ some people have been posting design thieves to this site.
By the way, I see you are from Rochester NY, I am not from there originally but i went to school at RIT there.
@Damien – It all depends on how they react to being called out. Some apologize and immediately take it down while others put up a fight and act like nothing is wrong and avoid it altogether.
@Danny – Yeah they definitely need to be exposed!
@Jerlyn – Thanks for the link! That’s cool – my sister and some friends went to school there. Funny you live in NYC and went to school in Rochester since I went to school in NYC haha.
Thanks for this post Shannon. I never knew there was such a huge problem with design thieves.
Thanks also to all the people who posted links related to this. Some of this stuff is very funny. People have no scruples!
I’ve noticed something in common with most of these thieves. I’m sure others have noticed it too but didn’t want to bring it up. They are mostly Indians.
[...] Design Thieves (an awesome post by Shannon Farrell about the rip-off of Toby Powell’s site) [...]
I’m not surprise this kind of stuff happens all the time, its really sad.