Immitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery by John Martin

28Aug

Over the weekend I noticed an unusual amount of items appearing in the RSS reader for “Virgin Radio”. After flicking through the blog posts and tweets I discovered that Mix 99.9fm radio in Toronto has been renamed to Virgin Radio 999. I didn’t think any more of it until I got into the office and decided to visit the website to see what it was all about. My reaction went from shock to flattery to amusement.

So like any web developer that suspects another site has been “inspired” by your design, I grab for my trusty toolkit (in this case the brilliant Firefox extension Firebug) and start ripping the site apart. I won’t bore you with the details, but our friends in Toronto have done an OK job at being “heavily influenced” by our site.

Apart from the obvious template comparisons I found the following (screen below). It seems that someone forgot to take out our CSS and properly position news nav. Oh dear.

A – for effort
D – for implementation

John

Categories: Media Technology
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Posted by adam on August 28, 2008

Comments (8)

  1. ed @ August 28, 2008 at 4:37 pm | Permalink

    So they just steal that design? Or, they had moral rights to do that because they are also called as “Virgin Radio” now? :)

  2. Roy M @ August 28, 2008 at 8:17 pm | Permalink

    You mean they didn’t even ask?

    How rude!

  3. Paul Dawson @ August 28, 2008 at 8:19 pm | Permalink

    Just a little bit overly-inspired there!

    Also not to mention that they forgot to add the JQuery library.

  4. Colin @ August 28, 2008 at 9:32 pm | Permalink

    I have been listening, in Toronto, to Virgin Radio online, using iTunes, for years. When I heard about the re-branding of mix999 as virgin radio 999, was a little confused. I know from listening, that there is going to be a name change at the VR that I know and love, but can you say whether this new Toronto vr is the first of many new vrs to dot the globe, or is this a one off?

  5. Oliver @ August 29, 2008 at 2:47 am | Permalink

    Cheeky bloomin mares . . .

    That is not great is it.

    It looks rubbish and to be honest, as a consumer, I wouldn’t want to use any company that rips off another: in terms of the look like they have done.

    It lacks originality and isn’t really very professional.

    Didn’t someone say that imitation was the highest form of flattery?

    Ollie
    http://www.iwishtravel.co.uk/blog

  6. Niko (from Manila) @ August 29, 2008 at 6:05 am | Permalink

    Kinda messy, I reckoned, but a good job in being “inspired.” I actually thought whether you really had something to do with it, until I realized that Richard Branson couldn’t have possibly had something to do with it… :p

  7. John @ August 30, 2008 at 7:16 am | Permalink

    You havent seen
    http://www.virginradio.it/

    its very cool, and a really good station to listen to as well!

  8. wwwjim @ September 2, 2008 at 1:12 am | Permalink

    LOL Adam — I’m a web designer in the States, and I got a chuckle as I know exactly the feeling of seeing your work end up somewhere unexpected – half-amused and half-angry. Just remember what they say about imitation being the greatest form of flattery. PS, I’ve enjoyed your old site and look forward to seeing what your new branding holds.

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