I got a great book today: Pictorial Symbols, second enlarged edition, from the Pictograph Corporation, 1943 (similar to this).  The images are by Rudolph Modley, a student of Otto Neurath who I wrote about in my last post.  I looked up ‘librarian’ in the index and was directed to pages 16-17, as seen below.  I’m thinking 1208 and 1308 are the most likely suspects on these pages.  Um, notice anything funny about all of these pictographs below?  A recurring theme, perhaps?

To get to the point, I noticed a tweet today by someone called @imakeshinylove who was lamenting that Urban Outfitters had jacked her jewelry design.  Check out her blog post.  Indeed, she made little metal charms of states and countries with hearts stamped out of them and Urban Outfitters, who evidently have a reputation for doing things like this, totally bit off of her design.

I find it hard to know what to do with this situation.  Designers snag each others images and ideas all of the time.  It is part of the business.  Fashion designers bring sneaky James Bond style secret cameras with them when they go on shopping trips so that they can later reference items they see in heigh-end stores.  Designers are given budgets to shop for inspiration; they purchase things only to take them apart and understand their construction so that it can be mimicked.  What happened to @imakeshinylove totally sucks, but does she have an intellectual property case?  Can it be proven that Urban Outfitters didn’t have some kind of parallel inspiration?

Modely’s pictographs above are no longer clearly protected by copyright.  If they are I hope someone will notify me and I’ll either take them down or pay the rightful owner.  Do not misunderstand me, I totally feel for @imakeshinylove in her situation.  But because her design is clear, simple, and elegant in its execution- in fact it is very much a pictograph- I’m not sure she can win a case against Urban Outfitters.  This concept of the ‘original idea’, particularly when applied to good minimal, communicative, reductive design becomes troublesome.  The more complex the execution of the idea, the easier it is to determine what is an ‘original idea’. If Modley’s pictorial symbols are in fact still under copyright and I want to make an iconographic symbol for ‘family’ or ‘car’ to use on a website, what other than my conscience is to stop me from reproducing his symbol with some minor difference?

Update: here’s a much more complete rundown of the goings-on with Urban Outfitters.  Thanks, Jonathan (a dude on Facebook).