Feb 22

On plagiarism

design, musing No Comments »

As I’ve said before, a lot of my work tends to involve producing things based on pre-existing things. Typically, somebody needs a leaflet in the style of a pre-existing poster, or a range of publicity based on a logo that’s already been designed. Or something along those lines.

A while ago, I was doing some work for an organisation who were in the middle of choosing a new logo. They’d narrowed it down to two different options that had been mocked up by an unnamed designer (thankfully, I don’t know who it was). Knowing that I’d be producing some publicity for them, I put together quite a few designs based on the colours and elements within both logos. In the end, one was chosen and the other discarded.

Only, the following week, I saw the discarded option on the packaging for some Nintendo Wii accessories. A couple of weeks after that, in a stationery shop (as opposed to the moving kind) I saw a clipboard whose entire design consisted of just this image. And it keeps coming back to haunt me; recently I saw the same image in the background of a website for a printing company.

Please don’t take this as a criticism of any of these services/products; I presume the image involved is from a stock library, and that they’re using it entirely legitimately. What I object to, though, is a designer claiming to have produced this as a bespoke logo, for an organisation who would have no way to tell that this wasn’t the case.

I was prompted to write about this because I recently experienced almost exactly the same thing, again. Once more I was working on some material for an organisation who’d already had a logo designed by somebody else. I tracked down the font that they’d used – and, lo and behold, it turns out that the graphical element of this logo was nothing more than an abstract character from the font itself. Furthermore, an entire poster had been designed using a graphical pattern that just consisted of these characters.

Again, perhaps this was entirely legitimate; the font, after all, is available on a Creative Commons license. But again, my problem is with a “designer” (and yes, those were quotation marks, darn it) who implicitly claims to have produced these things, as a bespoke idea, for a client who has no way of knowing otherwise. More than anything, it’s an honour thing.

I’m experiencing something similar to that other great realisation we all go through: the fact that other people tell lies on their job applications, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve never lied, or even particularly exaggerated, anything on a job application or a CV, and I’ve gradually found peace with the grudging acceptance that this puts me at a disadvantage compared with those who do. I guess this is similar.

But I don’t have to like it.

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Nov 10

Saving graphics from a PDF to use on the web

tips No Comments »

Now and then I get sent stuff and asked to turn it into other stuff. I’m sure there are better ways of phrasing that, but this will do for my purposes. Let’s agree to overlook the wording and move on to the content, shall we?

In the spirit of “please turn this stuff into some other stuff,” I was sent a very large PDF document so that I could use some of the images in it in a web design I was working on. It’s not too tricky to extract the graphics from a PDF — I found a tip here, for example — but then I ran into a problem. Each picture I extracted had its colour and contrast almost irrevocably strangified. I tried a bit of fiddling around in Aperture but it was clearly going to be a long and laborious process.

It seemed clear enough that the problem related to colour profiles, which are something I try to avoid learning about whenever possible. (To be honest, my calibrated iMac screen, InDesign’s PDF export, and every litho printing shop I’ve used work so well together that colour accuracy has never been a problem.) All these pictures had been converted for CMYK printing, rather than the RGB I needed.

But the solution turned out to be pretty straightforward if you have Acrobat Professional and Photoshop:

  • First of all, open the PDF in Acrobat Pro.
  • Choose Advanced – Print Production – Convert Colors.
  • In the Document Colors window that appears, look for anything that mentions CMYK; if it’s there, that’s your problem.
  • Select it, choose Convert from the Action drop-down, and choose an RGB profile in the Destination Space box. (I used Adobe RGB 1998).
  • Click OK and let it do its thing, then save the PDF. It won’t look any different at this stage, because Acrobat Professional had been converting the colours to display them on your screen anyway.
  • Now open the PDF in Photoshop.
  • When the Import PDF box appears, choose images (rather than pages).
  • Select any or all of the pictures you want, and the pictures are imported, correctly displayed, and ready for you to enact your nefarious schemes upon them.
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