After a long week I found out that the advertising agency representing Toyota seems to have taken some creative license with the 9rules logo. Toyota Georgetown is having a conference where for some reason they thought it appropriate to modify the 9rules logo a little bit and use it as their logo for the conference. Here’s a little graphic design sequence showing just how closely their “logo” matches up with ours:
Flipped, color shifted, and some leaves jiggled around, but it’s pretty obvious. In fact if you line up their version with the 9rules logo 2nd from the right in that image, the big leaves on the left and right line up perfectly, along with the bottom stem. Here’s another image with their version layered on top of a flipped 9rules logo. I’ve pointed out the best parts 🙂
Now while the 9rules logo is not trademarked to 9rules, Inc., it’s still copyrighted to me. Back in April 2005 I documented my creative process over at Paul’s blog and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of references of it all around the Web so prior art is not the issue. The issue is that it’s just totally lame of them to do it to anybody.
I have been in contact with their ad agency’s legal department (meaning, they wrote me a really long email after I wrote them a really short one) and they still maintain that the two logos look nothing alike.
Since Toyota has taken a Web 2.0 Mashup Hammer to the 9rules logo, I thought it only fair that I mash their own logo up in a similar way. Everybody, I present to you, the shiny new (and totally original!) Business Logs logo!
Maaan, so much friendlier! While it may appear that I merely flipped the logo, re-colored it, and removed a small area, you can rest assured it’s completely and totally different from the Toyota logo in every way, shape, and form. Toyota logo? What’s that?
To celebrate megacompany Toyota’s willingness to use the 9rules logo for whatever they want, I now invite all of you to join the Toyota Logo Mashup Challenge! Grab a gigantic version of the Toyota logo from over here, change it up in some small (but totally creative and original!) ways, and then post a link to your version in the comments. Each commenter on this thread who posts a link to their version of the Toyota logo will be automatically entered into the Toyota Logo Mashup Challenge! On October 19th a winner will be randomly selected and they’ll get a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate courtesy your neighborhood Toyota Dealer…. err…. courtesy my wallet!
Aaaaaand get your engines runnin’!!!