Anil Dash noted the design rip-off of MovableType by TRYBranding.com. At first I was amused at the foolhardiness of this person’s action. Then I looked around some more, and so did others. A pattern of serial design plagiarism has emerged. Here is what has been found so far (sites he copied are in parenthesis):
TRYBranding.com – his main site (rip-off of MovableType)
TRYBranding Idle Mussings – his marketing blog (rip-off of Kottke.org)
Bizactions Weblog – a blog he produced for a client (rip-off of TypePad)
The author of all of these sites is one Tommy R. Young. He’s obviously a marketing genius as his initials are T.R.Y. and his site is named TRYBranding, get it? The galling part is the Bizactions site, which seems to indicate that Mr. Young is reselling the blog designs he is stealing. Also it’s a little tacky to put copyrights on page designs you’ve stolen.
Anyway Mr. Young is the thieving asshat of the week. Feel free to drop him a line and let him know how awesome his design skills are. His e-mail address is: [email protected].
Update: In the comments Kathy notes that the pages are “down”. I’ve changed the link for TRYBranding.com to the Google cache version. You’ll have to take everyone’s word for it that the other pages were exact copies (except for the content). Joni even notes that the page HTML comments show were it was saved from. It seems Mr. Young figured out his ass was showing and deceide to pull up his pants…
‘effing chutzpah to a nauseating degree. Any chance he could be forced (legally) to alter his designs, I wonder…?
Kevin, you know how I feel about that kinda stuff. Remember how I freaked about the logo?
But back to Mr. TRY-ingtoohard, the funniest thing of all is if you view the source code for the Bizactions weblog, he didn’t even bother to clean it up. This is right up there at the top:
I laughed so hard I almost peed myself! But it’s really not funny. MovableType and Noah Grey are the two most ripped off web page designs around according to http://www.pirated-sites.com.
In fact, you ought to turn these sites in to piratedsites.com.
Aack! That comment snipped didn’t come through.
But here it is, with brackets substituted. This is what you find at the top of every web page that your browser saves to your hard drive. Didn’t even have the decency to remove it. Sheesh!
[!– saved from url=(0033)http://www.typepad.com/resources/ –]
The two MT ripoffs are now blank pages.
Good work, Kevin. That guy is a jackass.
How do you spot these things? Damn.
Found you via v-kate, you’re my magic #100 feed.
Nice work.