Wriging

Did you draw a lot of uh... "inspiration" from jeffcroft.com?

Also, on a totally unrelated note, the moral of Cameron Moll's article "Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal" was to "copy the inspiration, not the outcome"

Thanks for your dehortation. I will remember it always in future.
And very pleased to make friends with you.

In what way does his site look like Jeff Croft's? I can see the inspiration in parts of the design but both outcomes look totally different. To insinuate he stole the design is uncalled for and hardly accurate.

hoofei, it looks like a great blog theme, perhaps you should release it in the future. Great work.

In fact, I referenced some cool sites included JeffCroft.com to make this theme. But I didn't steal they. I am a jackaroo in web design. I need to view many cool sites for improving.

I will release it in a few days. Thank you!
I am very happy to make friends with each of you.
My MSN: hoofei#gmail.com

P.S. I am sorry for my pool English. Excuse please!

Hoofei's design is more closely related to the http://bartelme.at/ site than Croft's. And even then, both of those sites pulled their inspiration from others that used the "3 rows" style of layout.

Heck, I think everyone has pulled from either Jeff Croft or Wolfgang (bartleme.at) I know if you go to my site, my hover effect is a rip of bartleme's - I even used some of his footer code - all with his permission.

Hoofei, that is an awesome site you have there. You did a great job on it!

Yeah I agree, it looks good Hoofei. I can definitely see the inspiration but I wouldn't at all consider it a rip off. We see you added your flavor to it! Good work.

It rocks Hoofei! Can't wait for the release :)

I wouldn't say it's a rip at all, good job, I like it. And giving credit to your inspirations is always good too.

Hey, that's one sweet template. Looking forward to the release to test it out. Great job!

Great theme! One of the best I've seen...ever. No way is it a rip. Inspired? Of course. Creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Seriously sweet design, gives me a bit of design envy. Nice job!

yeah, it's great wordpress theme. I like your theme.
Great work!

Great work!

Bottom line: the design looks like a ripoff of a good designer. That design is not yours. Period. You didn't create it from scratch. There are always tell-tale signs. Of course you referenced the jeffcroft.com site, but that only makes it more obvious to the reader. And do you think a designer isn't going to know one design to the next? Shoot, even *I* recognize it and I'm a recent grad of Graphic Design. Next time, don't try and pass something off as your own when it clearly isn't.

It's one thing to be inspired, but it's another to copy.

@avuee
Shoot, even *I* recognize it and I graduated 6 whole years ago. Any graduate of graphic design should know that there is nothing new, on the web or in the world. Just new ways of looking at things. I can't find any fault with Hoofel for adding flavor to a pre-existing layout.

From a usability standpoint, standardized layout is generally considered a good thing (it would be kind of nice, albeit boring, if the RSS links were always in the same location). It's the visual flavor that web designers add that makes a site unique.

From a usability standpoint, standardized layout is generally considered a good thing (it would be kind of nice, albeit boring, if the RSS links were always in the same location). It's the visual flavor that web designers add that makes a site unique.

ttscoff, using the EXACT SAME comment widget is not "visual flavor... that makes a site unique", and neither is having the same header for your logo and navigation, or using the same style of borders in the footer.

Okay, okay. I may have missed some points in my cursory examination of the work. I still maintain that Hoofei, while perhaps stealing some points from established designs, did make something that stands on its own as a differentiated piece. It may not be brilliant, but it's not a duplicate.

I think the major factor here is that he used parts of designs that were not released to the public. My blog uses styles on the list items in the bottom block that you can find on many other blogs. But my styles were taken from a public domain theme that is linked to in my blogroll. I'm not going to defend outright theft of copyrighted materials and will humbly retract any statements that appeared to do so. I was under the impression that the issue was with the layout structure and not the "widgets" and styling.