“Emulatation” and Site Design

Mark Myers, over at nerdless.com, created a one-man start-up that designs websites centered on the Concrete5 content management system. (Nothing out of the ordinary here.) Well Myers’ latest foray with web design raises a number of ethical questions for the design community. His latest site, nerdless.com/designemulator.com/—which I’m reluctant to link to because I don’t want to give it any more page views—stresses “emulating” the design of other sites, instead of creating an original for clients.

Ready for a tangent? Well take this case study:

Remember the trademark battle between GM’s Jeep and Chrysler’s Hummer brands? GM alleged “the Hummer’s H2 concept vehicle violated Jeep’s trademark seven-slot grille.”

But a judge later ruled that Jeep’s branding wasn’t strong enough: most consumers didn’t associate the grill with Jeep products. (Though many do associate the distinctive grills of Volvo, BMW and Mercedes to their respective manufactures.) Moreover, no one was going to mistake a Hummer for a Jeep. The H2, as a whole, differed enough from Jeep’s fleet of vehicles to rule out the likelihood of attempted design plagiarism.

So back to web design. If Myer’s lifts Apple.com’s layout and populates it with content from one of his clients, is it truly that terrible?

There are certainly different shades of gray in this area. It’s not uncommon for web developers to peak under-the-hood—examining the source code of an interesting site, or admiring a bit of clever CSS trickery. It’s also not uncommon for designers to shift through forward-thinking sites with strong web design to for inspiration.

Moreover, there is certainly no limit of blogs and small sites using similar navigation and designs—often with only small tweaks and personalization on a theme provided by their CMS. And there are even open source CMS themes that emulate the look and feel of popular sites like Facebook and Twitter.

My true concern is the attribution of credit and how this works on a macro level. I doubt that a web developer ballsy enough to lift the CSS from a site a prominent as, say, Disney.com, would credit the source of the code.

I also wonder what would happen if this occurred on a larger level. Websites are, in my opinion, an extension of a brand. When properly executed, a website is integral to the marketing and communications efforts of an organization. It is the face the organization wishes to present to the world. Emulation can undermined that effort, and erode any uniqueness the website once had.