Too Small a World

Good post. Get inspired and do it better.

I agree; sometimes it's too easy as a designer to see a great peice of artwork, use it as “inspiration” and end up ripping off the design.

I find sites like http://www.toxel.com and http://www.touchey.com to be great sites for inspiration, because they're more about form and function than more specific elemtns like layout and colors.

I don't think there's much in it.
Now, I'm not a visual person, but it's a book cover…how much variety is possible?

It's clearly the same person. Those books are both published by Harvard Business Press, who should know better. Looks like they only have one font, too.

What's in my head? Applying the Dunbar Number to social networking group sizes in communities.

Speaking as someone with a design background.. I don’t really look at those designs and think rip off. I’d say that its a fairly common motif that they are both riffing on… Though clearly the relationship to the design and the book tittles is the same in both cases.. They also express this in different ways… or they have very different tones.

Hmm.. so you want ideas to rip your head off? We’d have to have some conversations about social media sometime.. lol, and I’ll tell you how this stuff really works! ;-) Basically, if you take the American Pragmatist school of philosophy, mix it with like Di Seitz Suzuki, Foucault, Jungian Psychology… perhaps a little Immanuel Kant, Heidegger… and a few other things.. you get a conceptual model for thinking about Social Media and the evolution of the digital channels that.. that makes about 80-90 percent of any conversation I’ve ever heard on the subject look like kids stuff. You’ll watch folks running around in a sky is falling.. what’s up with this disruption kind of mode.. and you’ll be singing Black Sabbath “I’ve seen the future and I’ve left it all behind.”

Which I suppose you already do to one extent or another but.. I mean I guess all of us who’ve been hanging out in this space for any length of time do but.. still 90% of the good thinking on the subject is driven by the same set of questions.. often being asked by a fairly narrow demographic of people.. and so it is that these thoughts are easily threatened by the “here comes everybody” crowd.. “Does that crowd even have wisdom?” we wonder.. Perhaps we must cultivate the modern equivalent of bread and circus?

But I think its more of a thing that if you look at the deeper systemic forces you get a picture things that’s.. well the rip your head off stuff… something more then just lip service to “this is still early days” or the acknowledgement that all this web 2.0 app crap stuff is just prototype city.. and all our shiny objects are just little arrows pointing us forward, ever so slowly.. at a rate equivalent to watching grass grow.. How long has twitter been out and people are still talking about it too much? What’s up with that?

Err.. yeah…

There are plenty of good ideas out there – and I've never been one to agree with the old Shakespeare saw 'it's all been done before'. Innovation is everywhere.

I'm still amazed at how many companies don't execute against the cheapest and perhaps most valuable form of marketing: customer service. If I was the Marketing VP of any major corp, I'd start there and work my way back. If I was VP of Sales, ditto. If I was CEO – I would treat my employees as customers. My customers. It is perhaps the most efficient way of building worth.

I don't think either design is a reach given their titles and neither feels derivative of the other. Also, the same solutions tend to occur to people all the time.

Could be someone ripping someone else off but I think it's a leap to assume that's the case.

When I worked in ad agencies, designers routinely perused design annuals, etc., for “ideas” on new projects. This is how an original idea becomes a meme, and then a cliche.

These books are from the same publisher.

Verdict: Lazy designer.

With recent job losses, being at home is becoming more common. I think the next big idea isn’t more online conversations, story-telling on our blogs, or different social media. I see families coming out of their mainly separate activities — tweeting, FB updating, and blogging — to bond as a family with the help of instructional and inclusive websites or products. Wii is one step in this direction. At my site, Think Like a Black Belt, parents – or any adult – can learn and pass on valuable skills to children in their own home, hopefully opening up new dialogue with their kids about self defense and personal safety.

did you check the publishers? possibly the same. publishers “recycle” cover art all the time (especially british publishers). authors rarely have a choice about what goes on the front anyway – my BIL is a respected author in his genre (both usa & uk), yet has no input on his covers. the clerk at the airport stall probably thought they looked “good” together, without a thought in the world for the irony.

I'm a little embarrassed for these two covers. Perhaps the same publisher? Same agent? oh goodness…

god damn you are thick

They are not the same! A bunch of people standing around is not original. This is the dumbest fucking blog I've ever seen.

You have inspired me, to kill myself.

It's kind of confusing, don't you think so?
They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. But copying other's work is the biggest mistake one can make. So what do we do, follow the inspiration or create something fresh?
Great post! :)

These are not “ripoffs” but rather just a bad use of “stock”. I would go so far as to say that these are typical of the kind of work being produced by “crowdsourcing”.

As a designer I would price the work on these covers with no more than 60 minutes – from “concept” to “pre-press” including the time taken to research and download the stock…

poor concept and shoddy execution…

Is it really too similar to be coincidental? The idea of using colour to pick out one or a small number from a crowd of icons or pictures is one I've seen used regularly over the years. Add to that the huge number of new book covers designed each year, and it seems to me quite believable it is coincidence that two designers should have ended up going for a similar riff of a previously used graphical device.

Indeed, given all the different ways in which book covers might be similar and the large number of pairs of new books covers to compare, it'd be pretty remarkable if there wasn't a passing similarity between any.

What's got my head going nowadays? Primarily the power of passion and harnessing that energy in online environments. There seems to be a search for innovation for its own sake but I'm looking to innovate in ways that fuel existing passions in groups of people. Fear and apathy are the greatest enemies of innovation in the current age.

I'm now fortunate to be surrounded by people who are highly motivated and organized and are just lacking the know-how to them fused to the proper social networks. I've been waiting for this for a long time. I'm excited!

As the design director of Harvard Business Press, I accept this criticism. That said, I do want to offer an explanation.

These two covers were not done by the same designer. And although similar, the fonts are actually different (Grotesque on the left, Din on the right). No intentional stealing occurred.

The “people” icon has been used on countless covers to convey genderless, ageless, race-neutral people. As some of the responders mentioned, it's not easy to come up with a unique universal symbol for people and thus, we designers often default to the true and tried generic stick figure, if you will. It's not out of laziness – it's out of a need to quickly convey meaning through use of imagery that is instantly and universally recognizable. Most readers don't spend too much time contemplating a cover. It's our job as designers to capture their interest and give them an immediate sense of what this book is about.

And for what it's worth, we have an intense jacket review process at Harvard Business Press and we partner with our authors on every level, including jacket design.

It's been enlightening reading all the responses. Not all were easy to digest, but I applaud the dialogue and look forward to continuing the discussion.

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It’s too small a world