Logo Collisions

Boing Boing's comments on logo plagiarism reminded me of something I've noticed - there are several cases of companies or organizations that are in completely different fields having nearly identical logos.


It is not likely that any plagiarism is involved, and apparently the companies don't care enough to sue, because this has been going on for quite some time.


For example, Applied Materials and Planned Parenthood have very similar logos. The differences are three lines versus two, a mirror image change, and a 3-D vs. 2-D look to the layering of the lines.


An even more stunning example is Sun Microsystems vs. Columbia Sportswear. The sole difference is that the little U shapes are filled in in the Columbia logo. From a distance or at low resolution, the two are identical.

In addition we have the recent news that Quark has run into trouble with the Scottish Arts Council for having a substantially similar logo, as seen in this Yahoo News story.

Mike Davidson has an excellent piece on Logo Originality as well.

Tags: logos graphic design