Burning Bag
At the tail end of last year, a friend asked if we had any involvement with a recent holiday campaign from Bloomingdale’s.
Alas our reply was no. We’re not claiming stylistic ownership of hand drawn patterns in letterforms but we felt there was something very familiar with the Bloomingdale’s work. Was this a case of inspiration coincidence or “you thought we wouldn’t notice“?
So, we sent a note to find out more. This is what we heard back….
“It is “a principle fundamental to copyright law” that “a copyright does not protect an idea, but only the expression of an idea.” Accordingly, the basic idea of creating a font with a pattern inside is not copyrightable. In fact, there are many artists that create hand drawn font with artwork inside the letters.
While both examples contain hand drawn artwork inside the lettering, that is where the similarities between the fonts end. The actual pattern inside the Bloomingdale’s font is completely different from your client’s alleged font. The Bloomingdale’s font contains original artwork that was inspired, among other things, by the tribal themed clothing featured in the catalog.”
…so there you go. Too bad they didn’t recognize that Erik changed up the patterns in repeat letters. A year later, maybe Erik and all the tribal sweaters he wears validates the fashion maven he really is. Next year we can hope they bring their brushstrokes to the yard.