The similar photographic theme of Marcie Jan Bronstein’s cover image on the January/February 2005 issue of STEP and Victor Schrager’s photo on the cover of fall 2003 OMNIVORE (designed by William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, Kevin Smith at Winterhouse) led to a discussion on the Design Observer website (see “Bird in Hand: When Does a Copy Become Plagiarism?” by William Drenttel) that was the origin of this series of articles.

It seems easy enough to keep the record straight with footnotes in written material, but outside academe such notes might seem clumsy or affected. Since all language use is based on earlier language use, where would it end?

Does a rose without a footnote smell as sweet and do I have to attribute that to Shakespeare, or is it an obvious enough cliché that nobody thinks it’s original?

The same is true for visual language, and clarification is a bigger problem. A web designer could hide links saying “this is visually based on Ladislav Sutnar’s work” and “I got this idea by watching Saul Bass’ titles but the technical direction came from Joshua Davis,” but there’s no way to do the equivalent on a product brochure or a business card. A system of notes to keep the record straight just doesn’t seem to be an option. Even if visual footnotes were practical, how would I figure out if my grid and sans serif type came from Joseph Müller-Brockman, Jan Tschichold, or somewhere else?

Creations patterned after others’ work are clearly not plagiarism if, like in footnoted writing, the original that they are modeled after is declared. Parody is one mode of creation that doesn’t work if it’s not recognized as a copy. Successful parody cannot be plagiarism because the relationship between the original and the copy is of its essence. Kieron Dwyer’s “Consumer Whore” logo, for instance, would make no sense if the viewer wasn’t familiar with the Starbucks trademark. Although Dwyer’s logo ran afoul of Starbucks trademark rights, its power as design parallels the legal protection of parody against charges of copyright infringement.³

The copyright exception only protects the parody of the object being copied. The U.S. Supreme Court found 2 Live Crew’s sendup of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” to be protected, but the same wouldn’t apply to “parody” like the various political reviews’ satirical songs set to the tunes of pop standards. 2 Live Crew used formal similarities with the Orbison song to focus a general mocking of saccharine music; the Consumer Whore logo’s criticism applied to consumerism in general but aimed at Starbucks in particular. When the Capitol Steps⁴ sing “We Arm the World,” their comments on American arms sales policy have nothing to do with the song “We Are the World.” Such work is often called parody, but since the satire is not aimed at the work that shares the formal structure, it does not qualify as parody.

Such song parodies have a graphic design parallel in thousands of weak formal borrowing of 1970s laundry detergent boxes and 1950s advertisements that adorn websites, club flyers, and posters. Sometimes there’s a thin connecting thread like MediaChannel’s connection between concentration of media ownership and concentrated detergents or a heftier one like Fast Company’s 1997 “The Brand Called You” cover.⁵ Clichés, maybe. But they make a lot more sense than the Tide-like AOL disks that flooded our mailboxes a few years ago.

At some point the word parody can’t be stretched far enough to cover certain formal reuse. Quotation or referencing are often the terms used for copying imagery or formal traits. What does referencing mean? You got me on that, but “My work references the commercial landscape of supermarket brand identities” sounds better than “I made it look like a Honey Nut Cheerios box.”

Appropriation is often a euphemism for theft (“I appropriated a pack of cigarettes from Mom’s purse”), but the term is used in the art world for strategies where famous artwork and/or mundane commercial imagery are copied for reasons such as the questioning of assumptions about authorship, originality, fame, or greatness and undermining the art object as commodity. Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, David Salle, and Sherrie Levine popularized artistic appropriation in the early 1980s.

Levine’s famous rephotographing of famous photographs (perhaps the art world’s most blatant work of appropriation) was not plagiarism. She made it clear that she was presenting photographs of famous photographs and that her contribution was not the original image but a questioning of the aura of the original. Nor was it parody. She was not making fun of the original work. In many ways her work was an extension of the questions posed by Marcel DuChamp’s famous readymades where the Dada artist took preexisting objects—bicycle wheels, snow shovels, or urinals—and declared them to be art.

Homage can be seen as the opposite of appropriation. It is the quotation of work meant to honor the original or its author. Rather than questioning or undermining, it affirms.

There is a long tradition of homage in painting—patterning work after a past master, not as a fraud or a cheap imitation but as a salute to great work of the past.

The problem with both appropriation and homage is that the strategy’s success relies on others’ understanding. Levine’s polished bronze castings of urinals seem to be an homage to Du-Champ’s “Fountain” but how would one know by looking whether they were appropriations meant to undermine assumptions, or parody, for that matter?

Most graphic design is somehow based on other graphic design. The struggle to determine what is too closely modeled after others’ work can be subjective. Before we can tackle those questions, we need to do the easy part and apply precisely used language to obvious, deliberate, and open copying. In later installments I will look at less-clear issues in copied graphic design and I’ll try to make some of those subjective judgments.