I’ve always wanted to be one of those amazing designers where you see the person’s work on a CSS gallery and say to yourself “oh man, that’s beautiful, I could never do a site like that”. I know these galleries also encourage a lot of designers to try to improve their work by generating ideas and inspiration.
But in the recent months I have come across TWO sites that have directly copied a design that I did while working at STUDIO7DESIGNS. We redesigned the company website to a magnificently detailed end result after 6 months of agonizing over pixels.
Personally I take it as a compliment, I always wanted to be at the skill level where other people envied my work. But I would love to hear what others think of this.

Pattaya Designs chooses to use the same header and logo style we did, as well as a DIRECT copy of all of our grey buttons.


Quaffs Labs is a lot more subtle. They used a similar grey button style to us, and used a layout the same (except reflected). These guys did a good job of their copy, I take this one as a compliment. The only thing that bugs me is the direct use of our title “Grow Your Business With Us”.

I understand that we don’t own the rights to any sort of generic grey button, but when using the same font, colour AND style of rounded corners for the button, it is a little obvious. We stared at that design for months on end, so I know what has been actually copied, and what is just a coincidence. Layouts are a little harder to argument, because I am often inspired by other designer’s layouts and choose to use elements in designs I work on. But this situation is different. They used the ENTIRE layout.
Let me know what you think.