I was looking through the design awards and I was surprised to see the top award for branding going to We & ! for a work that is clearly a copy of the graphic concept for the 2021 365 Calendar by Kit Hinrichs. Even to the color. So sad.
Uh, don’t knock on Radwimps, one of the greatest bands of the last 20 years! Soundtrack for Your Name is one of my favorite albums.
What ???
That’s the cover art for a Radwimps’s song.
I get what you’re saying but I gotta be honest, this feels a little tenuous to claim copying. I’ve created graphics very similar to this in the past, and I’m completely unaware of the Hinrichs calendar. Actually, looking at it now, my work pre-dates the Hinrichs calendar. I traced a ton of hand shapes in overlaying single-lineweight format similar to this, categorizing them by age, sex, and continental origin, then built a tool to allow you to filter and compare the shapes by colorizing the lines. Lo and behold, you could filter the handshapes and turn them red and they’d look even more similar to the album art. I’d just say that’s too simple of a concept to claim any copying.
Might just be me, and again, I’m not saying you’re wrong - someone may have pulled the Hinrichs calendar onto a mood board and just gone “what if we did that but with head shapes”. It just feels likely enough to me that this could have been made without that influence.
Did you publish it?
No, it’s proprietary work for a client.
Ok, even if it predated Henrichs’ calendar, if it wasn’t public, it essentially didn’t exist.
I’m with Wheat on this one. I feel like I could probably find something like this from the '60s. It’s an idea and ideas are cheap.
Having said that, I think the Henrich calendar is a better execution of the idea…but they weren’t competing against each other in the competition.
My criticism was not only meant for the award winner; they did what they did. It was also, and more of a call-out to the jury for not being aware of prior work in their part of the design profession. Kit Henrichs, formerly a partner in Pentagram, is one of the most widely known graphic designers of the last 50 years.
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This is a great point. Disclaimer that I haven’t served on a design jury more noteworthy than the local IDSA school events. But a lot of times when jury selections and chairs are announced it seems like they were chosen because they’d had a hit in recent years, so obviously they must be good. And maybe an initial question in a good design competition could be “what else is out there that’s similar”, like finding comps on the housing market.
The Radwimps’s cover art is actually cleverer (more clever?) than it looks.
to be entirely clear, I was never claiming anyone copied my work. I was pointing to the simplicity of the concept allowing it to be something that has probably been done countless times in the past, hence the tenuousness of claiming that someone copied someone else.
I feel like I’ve noticed this in every design awards. I always recognize something that’s been done (often better). When I was younger, I wanted to enter a contest with a rehash of a 10 year old winner, but never got around to it.
just wait until AI starts churning out “new” designs
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me tooo