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goes by the name veron. a definitive leo born august 1, 1984. a css enthusiast, web designer, food reviewer, avid traveler, proud kitten owner. when she's not at her job as an IS developer for the government, she's likely to be out dining, or visiting an interesting art gallery or event.
an anonymous person left me a comment yesterday alerting me to the fact that justjasmine.net has a design that looks a lot like mine. a copycat? of course i had to see it for myself.
at first sight, justjasmine.net’s blue website did not look exactly identical to my purple layout. but on closer inspection i realised that most parts of it had been ripped off my design in entirety, with paragraphs copied wholesale. initially i was confused whether it could be considered a ripoff. a few folks in the field whom i consulted assured me that it was.
justjasmine.net has since taken down “its” layout, but the copycat design can still be seen here (be sure to zoom in). here’s a side-by-side comparison of the elements that justjasmine.net copied.
i have a quick welcome message to visitors, asking them have “a piece of cookie” which i think is rather cute. justjasmine.net must have agreed, because it ripped off my idea too. changing “cookie” to “coffee” does not make it any more original.
as this layout features a fairy tale theme, i refer to myself as “the princess”. justjasmine.net has done the same too. note also the very similar phrasing of the self-introduction. the content was too similar to mine. even the english and chinese names were written the same way!
big shocker! justjasmine.net is owned by a web designer! part of the paragraph had been copied word-for-word.
the leaves in the background are identical. and the worded content is again similar.
email address laid out the same way. notice the huge cursive “E” in the background.
the music section showcases the albums i’m currently listening to on my ipod. not many people would mention the ipod part. but justjasmine.net did, surprisingly. the album covers, artists and titles are laid out in the exact same way as mine.
need i say more?
and, perhaps most blatantly, the copyright message itself was copied in entirety.
interestingly, there was a heavy usage of maple leaves in justjasmine.net’s design just like mine. my leaves are on the left, and sidebar on the right. justjasmine.net had its leaves on the right, and sidebar on the left.
after the owner justjasmine.net was caught red-handed, she changed her layout to one of those free blog templates.
within ten minutes, she changed the layout again, this time to an old template that she made, with a christmas theme.
finally, she decided to close the blog altogether.
before it went down, some people had left comments at justjasmine.net, urging the owner to make an apology to me. in the period of time that she made the two or three layout changes, i have received no word. meanwhile, i have to stress that the purpose of this blog entry is not to humiliate the owner of justjasmine.net. but having literally spent months on this current design, i would appreciate a bit of respect for my hard work.
i was slightly pissed at this blatant copying. honestly i would have been fine with it if it was just a small portion. but so many parts of my site had been ripped! and there wasn’t even a single reference to sparklette.net!
but well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it?
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Hi Veron,
Congrats on finding a ripoff of your site. They say “Plagiarism is the Best Compliment”. Now you know your design is so good people want to copy it.
Thanks for posting the detailed close-ups and screenshots. Upon closer look, I have to say it is a very very heaviliy-inspired design, almost a direct copy but it is not completely a copy. While clues indicate that the texts have indeed been copied wholesale, the graphics although similar are original, as in she made it herself and not something that was “right-click save as” or directly taken from a screenshot. It would be more accurate to say she was reusing the design concept, maple leaf patterns and the layout and positioning on her own site, stuff which you can’t really protect by copyright. You can’t copyright the use of the maple leaf brush, the use of square thumbnails nor the use of script fonts and icons beside headings.
Being a web designer, as she had claimed, commiting such an act of unoriginality can only bring much shame to herself and show how much a “web designer” or should I say “web copier”, she is.
Finally, her own design is SHIT, she calls herself a web designer just because she knows a bit of html and photoshop? I know why she copied the text, look at her English!
Shame. shame. shame.
*lol* I didn’t expect you to use such strong words against her. And you are right on about the “heavily-inspired design”. It wasn’t a case of right-click, save as, but the concepts were blatantly copied wholesale.
hmmmm… i have to wonder though… if the blog owner had contacted you beforehand… ask for permission to copy your layout, and restructured it to its supposed form… would you have allowed her to do so? would it have become a form of flattery?
It does speaks volume of your beautiful work… to have people risking copyright infringement to rip it…
frankly …. the reason i still check in from time to time is because of your blog’s exceptional design… and the wish to somehow emulate it…
cheers Lady Veron… you have won… and the offender have raised a flag of submission…
hehe… and oh… it seems like your rage still remain a force to be feared…
^)>
Veron, wordpress themes are very common right? Is your site is based on an existing theme?
If so, then there is a high chance that the structure will be the same. :)
Just looked at the comparisons again.. and you are right, even the design elements are similar. :) Well, take it as a compliment really. Maybe its time to sell your WP theme?
Hey birdface,
My rage still remains a force to be feared? You mean it ever was? *lol*
Hey Harro,
I don’t quite get what you’re getting at. Besides the fact that I’m using a Wordpress blogging engine, everything else in the theme has been designed from scratch (and I really mean from scratch, built in Photoshop, coded in HTML and CSS by hand). FYI the Wordpress theme would not have elements like “Visitors”, “The Princess”, “Email”, “Web Design Services”, “Music Albums”, “Movies” and “Copyright”. I came up with the entire structure myself.
I’m one of the frequent visitors of your blog since the time when you used to have a wap site. so I was quite upset when I saw her layout (especially the popcorns that she had used as well) and had to let you know.
For now, I’ll remain anonymous. :)
Hey Anon,
Wow the WAP site was a really long time ago! Would you please not be anonymous anymore? I’d really like to know who you are, since you probably know quite a bit about me already (from reading my blog). Pretty please? You could email me!
Veron, you had a WAP site? That sounds really cool and geeky. I would love to access your WAP site, if you have one. It really is boring trying to read anything using the WAP browser, though if I used Opera Mini, it makes things a whole lot easier!
morally, she should not have copied your blog structurally. she did try changing the some of the images but she could have done more on the layout structure and concept.
legally, she didn’t break any law. the web is free and the leaf and box cannot be properly copyrighted. there are too many surfers out there copying each other works.
i admired your design from “scratch”. but even from scratch, your design originality and inspiration would have come from some experience or memories and fused into a concept you want to portray, so it’s that really origin original? no one knows.
it’s a compliment that someone actually wanted your design so desirably. i have done web designs for projects, jobs, companies and even nus departments before, and i truly understand where you come from. the hours spent in perfecting the design you’ve in mind, is like seeing your baby grows. you want others to love your designs and also respect them as well.
your design is good but i have visited your blog time and again more for your entries and the comfortable feeling your blog expresses.
keep up the good work, you can’t stop people ripping off unless you exit the internet scene. true spirit of design is to better your previous design, believing there is no perfect design, less on stopping your design from spreading to others mind…
hi veron,
think of it this way: your layout is nice, that’s why ppl want to copy. Now that should sound like a good thing.
Kids nowadays really don’t have creativity.
hey veron,
just chanced upon your blog and saw your bak kwa entry. kinda random but have you tried chicken bak kwa? *lol* you can have that since you take chicken. switched to that since i stopped eating pork ;)
Hey pkchukiss,
I used to have a WAP edition blog that was made solely for viewing on mobile phones with non-colored screens. It had all my blog entries in full text but no pictures. Back then some of my guy friends in the army only got to come home on weekends. But they could at least surf my blog on their mobile phones! Haha!
Well right now the WAP site is no more, although I do have a PDA edition available. So if you were to surf sparklette.net on a PDA, you would be viewing a very different layout that’s customised to the tiny PDA screen.
Sounding all geeky now!
Hey lucas,
Thanks for your kind words. You are right on a number of points but I feel I need to clarify a couple of things.
1) I don’t think it is fair for anyone to question whether my design is original simply because parts of it were inspired from elsewhere. Even in the world of art, how many true artists are there? Van Gogh drew inspiration from artists like Monet and Millet. Would you consider him unoriginal?
We each are unique in our own creativity. We are inspired by good designs done by good designers. But do we simply copy the exact same concept? No, we take these inspirations and churn out something new.
There is a wild difference between inspiration and imitation. I think we need to be able to see that difference.
2) This current purple fairy tale layout is the 11th version of sparklette.net. Believe me when I say that in each of these 11 layouts, all my effort had gone into bettering each design each time. And certainly not “stopping [my] design from spreading to others mind”, because if that was the case, I would simply have locked this website to prevent anyone from seeing my design in the first place. That would be an effective measure wouldn’t it?
Like I said, I wouldn’t have minded at all if I had been given proper credit, or if it was just a small amount that was copied. Just not to the extent where random visitors can so easily tell at one glance that that website resembles mine.
Hey chillycraps,
Thanks! I do feel flattered, but that’s after the peeve.
Hey iloveyongsi,
Chicken bak kwa? Where can you get those? I wonder if it would be as good as the original pork bak kwa!
A software engineer once said to me that “it’s the greatest compliment an engineer can get when someone else chooses to copy our work”.
In other words, you design sure is damn good to inspire a ripoff! :P
(Off topic, I dread the day some guy start copying the applications I write)
Hey mervkwok,
Thanks, I am flattered! Well I wonder if that day came for you, would you feel flattered too? Or annoyed?
hey veron,
hmm my mom gets them for me from bee chiang heng, but you’re boycotting them, so… yar. maybe the other bigger brands will have them as well. anyhow, can’t remember what pork bak kwa tastes like to make a comparison, but the chicken ones are good!