Plagiarism in the candidature of Madrid 2016
by Sergio Ordonez at 6:37 am on Logotypes
21-09-2007: Another case of plagiarism the whole contest is a fake
Designed by Luis Coderque, this logo was already created for the brand Madrid. The worst in all this is this designer works for Saffron, the company who do the preselection of the 10 logos… its a shame
A couple of days ago, i wrote a post about the small conceptual base of the logos for Madrid 2016, the case is that we set up a circus and the dwarfs grow… now the plagiarism appears in this competition.
To the right, the logo for Madrid 2016, to the left, screenshot of the website of Augusto Valenti, logo designed by Liberonline
In this case i think it’s more than just a reasonable similarity, intended or not?… we’ll never know. The"author" of this logo is a graphic design student, which makes me ask my question again: wouldn’t it be better to hire an expert designer instead of making a contest?, if they’d have done that, the results would have been the same?
My opinion expressed in words of someone named Pako (comment extracted from EL PAIS):
"This is what happens when they make design contests. They should have asked a designer or a studio directly to make the logo. Of course, they’d have charged more, but the risk that something like this would happen would have been a lot smaller (even if it’s casuality or plagiarism). Anyway, basing the image of such an important event (or the corner bakery) in the "logo" looks absurd to me. They should have created a global strategy of communication and later a global image that, among other things, included the logo. But it’s cheaper to have a contest and also promote the event that way."
Another important comment, of Isa:
"…Appart from the plagiarism, the logo isn’t legible enough, it couldn’t be perfect, that we wouldn’t understand it. Haven’t they taken into account the usability of this logo for it’s different applications? Where’s the minimum reduction?"
And here comes Silvia:
"I’m not a graphic designer or anything like that,but this is practicing a profession without proper qualifications, and in other areas it’d be insulted if not penalized. I don’t understand why from public institucions this type of contest is promoted, that it has this consecuences is normal. We’re leaving a profession in the hands of a box of plastidecor (note: it’s a box of a crayons of a well-known trademark), we’re like this, a country of amateurs"
Now a reflection, as people say: "talk well or bad about me but spell my name". This logo has many people against it, but also some people that defend it, so it may get some votes after all… let’s imagine it wins… the "author" will be pretty popular, what message are we transmitting? I think that logo should be desqualified immediately because it doesn’t fulfill the originality criteria (intentionally or not), and better luck next time. But no… they’ll probably wait until it wins…
CONCLUSION: what starts bad ends bad… some call it though luck, coincidence, matter of taste… i call it small precaution, this contest is a mistake itself. Resignation now!!!
Communicate by Madrid 2016:
We’re doing the corresponding enquiries to see if it’s efectively plagiarism or just a unfortunate coincidence.
In contests open to a massive public this kind of situations happen. The commitement of the foundation Madrid 2016 is to guarantee the authenticity and originality of the winning proposal.
The process of selection has been supervised by a prestigious trademark consultant and we have followed a strict methodology in the selction of the pieces.
It doesn’t exist a tool (website or database) to check the 100% of the originality of a design. In this cases we have to trust in the experience and visual culture of the experts and mainly in the integrity of the contestants.
A solid experts panel - that includes Saffron (one of the most prestigious consultants of trademarks strategy and design), the creative director of Sr.Rushmore (one of the most creative agencies of Spain) and members of the foundation 20016 - have included this design in the top 10 and if it can be proven that it’s plagiarism, it assumes the responsibility in it’s decision and it’ll procede to desqualify the proposal.