Devil’s In the Details: How to Spot a Plagiarized Logo
Logo trends are rampant. Thus, graphics tend to look similar to each other. The devil’s in the details. Avoid having a lawsuit served to your doorstep and spot the telltale signs that your logo might be plagiarizing another.
Or vice versa. Either way, it’s better safe than sorry.
First, let’s get to know the parts of a logo to better spot plagiarism when it occurs. We don’t want to jumpstart a controversy despite its publicity; bad publicity is bad for branding.
Devil’s Thesis: Spotting Logo Plagiarism
When protecting intellectual property like logos, the two often methods are trademark and copyright. They may sound similar, but no.
Trademarking is specific graphics associated with your business. So that’s your logo, name, color palette, and overall design that points to you. As long as the visual differentiates you from your competition, a trademark is your best bet for protection.
On the other hand, copyright parameters primarily depend on the level of originality your work gives. Around 100% percent is the most acceptable level for copyright protection. But it’s also dependent on the parameters of the country you register your design too.
Thus, it’s better to have both to protect the elements used to distinguish you and your overall design. Now, let’s direct our magnifying glass towards spotting the plagiarized logos.
We divided them into two main topics:
- Know Your Logo Elements
- RESEARCH.
- Check Out the Tools
1. Know Your Logo Elements
Yes, we know it’s basic knowledge, but it doesn’t hurt to get a refresher from time to time. Thus, let’s get into them.
A logo has around six elements:
- Background – This first one dictates the color behind your visual itself. Questions like color and placement of elements come into play for this portion of the logo.
- Color Palette – The next one is choosing the distinct color associated with your business. Around 80% of consumers say that they recognize a brand from a business’s color itself (Oberlo). Take pointers from that and make your color stand out. A popular color trend that you could try is gradient. It’s a blending of two to three hues of the color spectrum. Or you can try this year’s Pantone Highlight, Veri Peri, or Periwinkle.
- Placement – Thirdly, try to mix and match the location of your text and graphics. It aids in making your logo more unique, which qualifies for better copyright and trademark protection. The left side corner is the most common logo placement on any medium, so work around that or change it entirely.
- Text – You’d think that text and typography should be just one bullet, but nope. Text in itself means that you also have to make your business name and other words unique and attention-grabbing. Try to add a memeable phrase to aid you.
- Typography – Second to the last, look for the best-fit font for your business. But ensure that it’s readable. Nowadays, typography trends in the rage are retro stylization and customized fonts to give your brand identity more personality.
- Visuals – Lastly, we talk about the graphic of your logo. It needs to have that extra tweak to distinguish it from your competitors. After all, the brain processes images at a 13-millisecond rate which is enough to make the first impression. Make your impact bold and great to avoid the lawsuit and one-up your competition.
When creating your logo, ensure that you have all these finalized for better anti-plagiarism measures.
2. RESEARCH.
After finalizing the details of your logo, we cannot emphasize this point enough. When you research, as a designer, you need to ensure that your design is not copying any other logos.
Trust us. You don’t want another PayPal and Pandora mishap like in 2017. The online community also expressed their confusion between the two since Pandora rebranded their logo to have a similar P and blue as a logo. But after the lawsuit, they changed their color scheme to a combination of blue, indigo, and red.
Aside from ensuring that your creation isn’t an infringement itself, you confirm that your portfolio is protected. Any design created by you is already copyrighted. Thus, constantly checking if someone copied your work online aids you in spotting plagiarized logos.
Some tips to better do research:
- Drag photo into the search bar as is
- Invert the picture and drag it into the search bar
- If the client gave the image, search using the file name (especially if a stock photo)
- Check related results to your prior search
- Do a reverse image search
- Check every social media platform if search results lead there
3. Check Out the Tools
Now that you know how to do research efficiently, here’s a list of image plagiarism checkers you can use for both personal and business endeavors:
- Grades Fixer
- Image Search by SmallSeoTools
- Google Search
- Google Lens
- Search Engine Reports
These five tools are free and aid you with reverse search or otherwise.
Incorporating a robust plagiarism checker into your toolkit is essential for anyone in the creative field to ensure their work remains original and free from infringement.
Good Bye Devil in Details
And there you have it—a complete guide to spotting plagiarism in logo creation. You can do these at your own pace and whenever you want to start.
We’ll support you. After all, BrandCrowd offers around 75,000+ templates for your brand identity needs. Our logo maker is easy to use and free from trademark and copyright infringements.
Better safe than sorry, check for plagiarism today!