Our Blog
Public shaming of designerstoolbox.com
How is it that in a time where everything is so connected and information is passed at such lightning speeds, people continue to steal, rip and defraud other members of the design community? As if somehow they’ll be able to get away with it. Yes, the internet is a big place, but its communities are still very small and well connected.
It’s obvious we didn’t design the original iPhone interface, therefore, we own no rights in respect to the recreation of its elements. But we did put in a lot of time and effort to produce the original iPhone GUI PSD, and we did it for the betterment of the community, for aspiring iPhone designers and developers everywhere, including ourselves.
Like any royalty free photography or stock vector artwork, they are designed to be used, shared and reused, all with the ethos of helping one another out. All we ask is for a little accreditation to compensate our donation of time.
The fact that the design community responded by celebrating our efforts with a ton of praise, actually motivated us to continue building more helpful tools like the Palm Pre GUI PSD.
But others looked upon our efforts with evil and greed, and took what we produced, switched up a couple small details and republished our efforts for their audience without a single bit of accreditation. A bold move from a website that’s been trusted by their readers for the originality and usefulness of their content.
There are a number of things that made it evident they didn’t create their own. The folder structures, layer names all remain the same. The dead giveaway was when they used our custom iconography.
Update: They’ve since removed the file and replaced it with separate flattened elements. Still no response from them though clearly they’ve seen this post and the related tweets.
Terrible
It’s a shame you get idiots who so blatantly steal peoples work. I for one will not be visiting designerstoolbox ever again. Well done for outing them Greg!
terrible. I’m glad they’re being aired out for their foolishness.
brooklyn.
it’s bound to happen.
happens to us all the time.
you just got look at it as a compliment.
if they weren’t ripping your shit off, then you wouldn’t be doing something right
This is obviously stolen from yours, but did you contact them before posting this? Could be the work of a rogue contractor… two sides to every story and all…
In my opinion you guys shouldn’t bother, it’s always disappointing to see your being ripped off but in this day and age I think it’s inevitable and pretty much part of our lifes.
We sent them an email last week but didn’t hear back.
I’m leading a discussion on ethics in the interaction design / information architecture / user experience fields at an upcoming conference. I’d love to talk with you about this. I’d also like to talk with the designerstoolbox.com people that you contacted to get their view as to how this occurred and how they plan to address it.
-K
ugh! All it would take is to throw up a link and give you a little props… It took me 20 seconds to post this comment.
Dude, you should check your source because it looks like they have their own.
It looks like they may have made some adjustments to the PSD. It looks as if they have broken the PSD into parts. http://www.designerstoolbox.com/designresources/iphone/ I couldn’t find the referenced file. I’ll admit I did not spend a ton of time looking. I used to use the site but will no longer.
@jaypiddy
This is quite sad. I’ll be sure to blog about this to spread the word. Unfortunately, releasing quality work will always mean that people will steal it.
It looks like they’ve switched up their iPhone GUI PSD. So clearly they got the message, they just didn’t seem courteous enough to offer an apology.
Such a sadness. I’ve sent them a sternly worded facsimile expressing my outrage.
I read your blog off and on, but I’m not sure what Designers Toolbox is doing wrong. They seem to have a completely different set of graphics. The bar you called out has different shapes and colours.
I get the feeling that you are upset because another website provides downloads to items you also have. I would get off your high horse because most of the graphic elements are actually Apple’s. And I do not see a mention to that affect on your website.
– Heather
I liked the toolbox. I do not know why the people are not liking this toolbox.
@Heather: First of all, the images in this post indicate that the graphics are virtually identical, and have obvious similarities. But even if they’re COMPLETELY different, so what? The code is obviously almost the same, and lacks any real originality, which is the primary point of this post. The point is that they didn’t come up with even the little details on their own, they mostly just copied someone else’s work, without crediting them.
I do understand being upset about this, but at least they aren’t charging money for this program (or are they? It doesn’t look like it, from what I saw…).
Our issue is that they seem to have taken our work and with no accreditation or informing us have passed it off as their own original work. Other people have asked to use the PSD as the basis for stencils or files and we have allowed them with the only requirement being that they acknowledge our original work.
We spent time assembling those elements as an internal tool. We shared it because we thought others would find it helpful. We provide it free but we do get benefits of traffic to our site and awareness of our company.
There is nothing stopping someone from assembling their own PSD of iPhone elements. But downloading our work and making minor changes to seemingly mask the source and then pass it off as their own is wrong. Designer’s Toolbox is a commercial site and while they don’t sell the iPhone template they use it to attract traffic
We get that these things are going to happen… http://new-cell-phone.org/ for example. We just think we have a right to call out Designer’s Toolbox on their actions. For the record we tried to contact them but there is no email or phone number on their site, only a form. We asked them about it to hear their side and no one ever responded.
We are fully prepared to hear their side of the story but they haven’t said anything that we are aware of. They have since changed the file on their site but provided no explanation as to why. We leave you to your own conclusions.
We will also leave you to your own conclusions as to whether it is coincidence that Geoff began getting signed up for hundreds of mailing lists right after our blog post.Addition:
Designer’s Toolbox vehemently denies anything to do with Geoff being spammed mercilessly. I want to retract that suggestion.
@Heather You may want to go back and read our post, seems like most of your questions and concerns are addressed in it.
To be clear – They downloaded our PSD that was completely constructed using smart objects in Photoshop so designers could easily modify them. Instead of creating their own elements they simply copied over all the custom elements into their own template, slapped their logo on it, rearranged the layout and changed the background colour. If they had of actually created their own elements or just taken Apple’s flattened elements then there is no issue.
In regards to: “I would get off your high horse because most of the graphic elements are actually Apple’s. And I do not see a mention to that affect on your website.”
No high horse here, we just won’t tolerate people stealing our work and making it their own. No, we don’t own the rights to Apple’s UI but we did completely rebuild it in Photoshop and arguably, that’s more ownable. Greg mentioned that in the post by saying “It’s obvious we didn’t design the original iPhone interface, therefore, we own no rights in respect to the recreation of its elements.”
They’ve since changed the file, as mentioned in the update at the end of the post, so if you look at their site now you can see they’ve done the right thing which is taking the idea and creating their own, something they should have done in the first place.
What’s most unfortunate is that they never wrote back or responded to my original email or this post.
Formal Apology to Teehan+Lax
In our haste to provide graphic elements to the design community, we did the worst thing possible, plagiarize.
We want to apologies to Teehan+Lax for taking their hard work and repurposing it as our own, there is no excuse for our actions, none.
Since Teehan+Lax pointed out our error, we have adjust our page and now provide our own iPhone graphics. Furthermore, on our page have included a link back to Teehan+Lax’s blog post with the original iPhone GUI elements.
We hope all can learn from our mistake and we ask forgiveness from Teehan+Lax and the design community.
Sincerely,
Designers Toolbox
Heather:
It looks to me that you work at Designers Toolbox and made a poor attempt to defend your actions. I’m not related in anyway with this Blog, but I find it a huge resource and if you were to download the original PSD and browse all its layers/ elements in it, you will know the insane amount of work these guys put into the file, and they gave it for free to anyone that wanted to use it, that is HUGE, I have used this file for mock ups, and I want to thanks Teehan/Lax for making it available.
I am saddened to hear that a well known design blog such as designerstoolbox would do such a thing. Hopefully this post will deter others from such blatant plagiarism. Thanks for the PSD btw.
Stealing idea but it’s does stealing design too.. what a shameless guys. Jerky wall bumpered face like that. but if you do the PSD for free open source then you must really think to get it free.Free release.and you get glory after all.Thank You , thanks Good too.
Haha, when I had heard you guy’s released this, I was waiting for this to happen. But I never got around to checking if it did occur. NOW I KNOW!
What a shame though, to see other people do this, especially DesignerToolBox, to try & reap in credit & attention from others hard work. To make matters worse & make ‘em seem even more pathetic, that they tried to flatten images to cover it up, LMAO, oldest & stupid trick in the book!
Good thing ya flamed ‘em & tweeted about the situation. Anyways, I loved this piece you guys released, enjoyed it myself messing around with app interface designs.
– MexiChriS
@Zaigham – Are you kidding? I just took a look at your new Alpha website – You’ve stolen the entire layout, including imagery from Huge. What a hypocrit. You lifted images straight off the site and stole pretty much everything about it, other than your buggy javascript.
http://www.hugeinc.com/process/
Tim