Imitation; is it flattery?
Actually, in this case, imitation is just plain laziness. It’s ironic that Side Dish Designs is a design and web firm, but can’t be bothered to generate and code their own site. Ok, so this isn’t nearly as bad as other cases where sites and work have been appropriated by people scouring the net looking for web designs. It’s a white box, I get it. But at least make it a little different! Make it a little bigger/smaller and with your own supporting images and your own code! There are lots of white boxes out there, but this particular one, should anyone care to look at the source code of both sites, is my white box, made by me and my friend Photoshop. When I set out on this current design, I had gotten quotes from several developers, and the timeline was going to be very close to when I needed it. And anyone who has worked with creatives knows timelines are a moving target, so I decided to do it myself.
Here is my site as it has looked for a couple of years now.
It’s identical in every way to my site, right down to the pixel dimensions, save for the actual content.
What’s more, if you go to Side Dish Design’s “About” page, you are treated to some very compelling reasons as to why you should hire them, things like “Having a career new media at Sony Music, I have the experience needed to evaluate your situation and make sure all the bases are covered. It also keeps me up to date with new ideas I can bring to the table. With the web at our fingertips and a plethora of information available, I love to find and use solutions that cost little to no money but fit perfectly in the project. It’s about using good tools; not dishing out more dough.” Quite a contradiction, wouldn’t you say, unless you consider wholesale copying of web code to be the sort of “new ideas” that are brought to the table. Now it’s easy to see what they mean by “find and use solutions that cost little to no money…”
One thing I worked a lot on was the full integration of my blog into my website. I never liked having to leave a photographer’s website to see their blog. I always thought it should be consistent across the board. With that in mind, I set out on integrating one of my favorite templates into my blog. It took quite a lot of effort considering I don’t know the first thing about web design or CSS, but I eventually was able to make it work. It would seem from Side Dish Design’s blog page that they thought it was a good idea, too, but for some reason, these web designers just couldn’t put it together very well. How to tackle the problem? I guess for a web designer, it means shoving the blog into an iframe (iframe rhymes with lame, by the way). I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to do so myself after fighting with my blog template, but I’m very particular about things, and I’d rather have it right or not at all than use some awful implementation like an iframe.
This doesn’t bother me as much as it would were I not in the process of a completely new design. It’s just a shame that someone that calls themselves a web designer can’t design their own basic site. It really makes you wonder if the designs they push in their portfolio are really theirs. It at least calls it into question I would think. I understand someone looking at other sites for inspiration and such, but I can’t understand a designer swiping actual code and supporting images to do their web design. Where’s your pride in your work? Where’s your passion for design? This is a great lesson that in what happens when you try to make something that wasn’t designed for your purpose work for something else. It falls flat. It’s a compromise at best.
I guess if you need your website designed, why not cut the middle-man out and contact me directly? LOL. Thanks to the person that gave me the heads-up on this!
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 by Climie
Filed under: Wall of Shame
lame! i’ve had it happen to me on 3 separate occasions and i never felt flattered. five bones says this is just some kid trying to do a bit of work outside of his mcjob by putting together sites for his mom’s knitting club.
Attila showed me one of his “rips” before – guy left all the base code intact – so much so that the google analytics tracking data was still live.
I had a graphic designer do some work for me years ago – and afterwards his design (it was a store’s bag design) showed up on flyers for a “company” offering courses in layout and design.
I wish doing something was always as easy as stealing someone elses’ work – I’d have less to do in a day.
Pretty busted – I know what exactly what you mean. It’s a sad day for a designer when a photographer just trying to make his site work well is doing better work(and coding) then he could for himself.
People ask me to do their sites at times because they like the one I made for our company – but I’ve been in the same spot as you; I did it because it needed to be done.
Ha!
Blind leading the blind here? Both JVL and attila’s sites are very similar. No more similar the side dish and yours. Who stole from who here?
Not reinventing the wheel has always been design rule. In any field. I looked at both yours and the Side Dish site, the bare bones are similar but if is just hack kid, he’s at least a good one. Why not recreate yours verbatim? Why change it? Better yet, what can you learn from them?
I almost want to commend Side Dish. If they stole the code, they seem to be more worried about completing the job and moving on to paying gigs than portfolio site design. Now, I’m not advocating stealing, but pointing fingers is just plain dumb. Especially if you don’t plan on confronting them…
PS- Calling an iframe lame is pretty bad when you’re using tables and ImageReady to construct a site. DIVs and Dreamweaver would be more appropriate.
Josh – we are in total agreement on the frames/ImageReady point you’ve made. The next site is all CSS. However, this is a 2 year old DIY, and I’m not a coding purist. I’m a photographer that needed a site in a time frame that couldn’t be done by a designer. I’m not serving up zillions of pages, so the extra code is not a concern to me. Indeed, I shouldn’t even be using image maps, but none of this is seen by my end user like an iframe, so the net result is the same for my clients. It only creates more work for me on the occasion I have to work on something.
Your point further backs up my argument. Not only is the white box pixel for pixel, but they swiped bad, old code. That’s pretty silly.
I’m not claiming originality in the actual design. Nobody is. FWIW, Attila and JVL’s sites are most likely GPL blog templates, so I don’t see the point in that argument. My white box is similar to lots of white boxes, similar to Livebooks’ sites and tons of photographers sites in PDN’s annual awards issue. But I didn’t swipe someone else’s graphics or code. I made mine to my spec.
And finally, nobody contacted me asking to swipe my code, so there is no burden on me to contact them directly. I’m not even really upset about it. I’m simply pointing out the irony of a designer swiping code (messy code at that) and graphics when they should be making such basic things themselves.
simple & white has always been what i enjoy, but it is quite funny that a design site picked up from a DIY photographer, who happened to build a website.
i’m just glad someone else out there in the photographer world cares enough to not make you go full screen with [blog] [pics] yadadyayadaya at the spash page or makes me jump to their blogspot b/c they can’t take the time to learn just a lil bit of code.
hello, splash pages are so, i don’t know 1990′s
look forward to seeing your new site
my site and jvl’s site are hobby photoblogs and as such have only one purpose: to display a single photo and a single caption. photoblogs can’t really stray too far from a similar idea cause their function is very simple. however, marc’s site, being a site that has many functions and represents his business, can take on any number of different looks so copying it isn’t just a case of having found inspiration. the guy actually jacked files from here.
it happens all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it other than point it out and laugh at the plagiarist. however, commending them on being efficient and wanting to move on to the next job is hardly the right thing to do. a designer should take the utmost pride in their own online presence cause it’s their only chance to create a site that showcases exactly what they’re capable of doing, so if side dish can’t even put a little bit of effort and come up with an original design for themselves, what can they possibly do for their clients?
also, iframes, tables, and imageready are all lame. putting together your own website that doesn’t suck ass is not. marc: 1, sidedish: 0
oh, and for the record. the simple template on my site is my own creation. it looks simple but there’s actually a lot going on in terms of javascript and ajax. if someone were to jack it i’d probably be a bit peeved cause i put time in to create something unique for my own site which doesn’t mean that anyone should be able to benefit from my work unless i’ve explicitly said they can. seen?