‘Design Rip’ has been the talk of the web design industry every now and then, and these days its some big companies like AOL and Google falling prey to the Design Theft. 

Recently AOL announced its newly designed aol.com portal homepage, the news is the design and layout resembles 80% of yahoo’s home page design. Critics came in from all corners of the industry (like Techcrunch) and AOL replaces the design overnight. 

Even at times, an internet innovation guru like Google itself does this goof up and changes the design ASAP after the page goes live. The IE7+ Google Toolbar promo page that Google did was under big comments as its similar to Yahoo IE7 promo page and the Google screenshot even had Yahoo! Toolbar image in it. That’s really sick. Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny posted it first and here’s the post.

Think these examples are bad for the design community as rippers will start referring these companies while ripping and will try to justify things. I read some good post sometime back in Digital-web which clearly defined Inspiration Vs Rip. Here’s the link. http://www.digital-web.com/articles/inspiration_vs_theft/

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