If you haven’t seen it, the Solo movie posters were essentially plagiarized from a French designer (Hachim Bahous) who produced extremely similar covers for a series of album covers.
I did see another post saying that Disney has stated that the design work was done by a third party agency, and was not done in house, so I don’t blame Disney. I would be curious to know the name of the agency though.
I will say that whoever the designer was with that agency is most likely in a crap ton of trouble and my guess is that they most likely are no longer working there.
So, just remember, using other work you find as inspiration is one thing … copying is quite another.
I’d say they changed it by 19%. 1% more change and they would have been okay .
For those that missed it, I’m being totally facetious. No 20% role exists. The concept of putting an image in text would be fair game, using similar distressing, color palettes, fonts, layout, and look in conjunction with the text treatment is down right foolish.
That aside, I’m a little surprised neither designer/artist broker the subject through the characters in one or two spots; certainly would have helped the millennium falcon feel less like a hood ornament.
Your right, they managed 19%, I charitably awarded that many points; being the world’s supreme and infallible judge of percentage of change of design affords me that right.
Gizmodo is saying they were produced by BLT Communications ( https://www.bltomato.com ) in Hollywood. It’s an agency that’s worked with the movie industry on feature film branding and promotion since the early '90s.
Looking at their website, it’s not a place staffed by amateurs. But it looks like they made at least one bad hire who’s likely now unemployed.
Does a company just let an employee go if something like this happens?
Or can they take them to court? They are, after all, going to be on the hook for some big bucks. Not that they’ll get much out of the designer’s hide, other than the satisfaction they will never work in the field again. I can’t imagine though, that the designs were done in a vacuum. Higher ups had to sign off on it, but how do you check for plagiarism of this nature?
And is it plagiarism?
How does anyone control the subconscious way an after-image may appear in a design after having viewed something that works. I had that happen in college on a project. Wasn’t even aware it happened until I found the original source about 3 days before the project was due. Took it to the professor. Picture Mr. Myagi in Karate Kid. “Do Over. You do not have much time.” Ouch. That’s one reason I’m not a designer these days. Old brain is playing tricks on me.
That worked there, if you just tried it, because that image has floated to the top of search rankings.
I wonder what would have happened if you tried it 3 months ago.
Sometimes a design solution can be so “generic” you might get 800 pages of hits too, but is it plagiarism?
I’m glad an earlier post said that was the Millennium Falcon at the bottom. Wouldn’t have guessed what it was. That is just a detail unneeded there.
I agree that sometimes your designs might unconsciously be influenced by something you saw, and I might chalk it up to that if the colors and the overall design details weren’t so “matched”. It’s not just the photo in the letters, its the height of the letters, the spacing of the letters, the color themes used, the very similar backgrounds used … it’s clearly a conscious attempt to mimic the overall design rather than an unconscious effort IMO.
Reversing a photo out of tightly spaced letters is nothing new, but when almost every other significant aspect of the design matches up — from color schemes to background textures — the odds of it being a coincidence drops to somewhere close to zero.
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