Over 20 designers have copied my website and I don't mind

nice catch!!!

The "touch of" is pretty revealing though, in the copy for the "coder" sections of the first and third.

Exactly. While it may be flattering to be copied, rote copying by a designer for what is presumed to be a demonstration of creativity is not acceptable.

Some of these are perfectly reasonable adaptations, others are quite close to duplicates.

I couldn't help but think this as well.

I also don't understand how someone who is supposedly a creative type and makes their own art/copyright material be able to unabashedly steal something like this.

What's even creepier by the way, is that some people even copied his smile and hair style for their photos.

Swap "Programmer" for "Designer". IP issues aside, their code/design solves the problem you paid them for.

It does make him look good that so many people like his design enough to copy it so blatantly.

I remember, back in 2008, I directly asked him if I could make something like his page and showed him a screenshot of my version.

Mine had a keyboard and a pencil instead of my face.

He said to go ahead. At the end I didn't, but that's a different story.

Hell, a lot of them didn’t even change the face on the “designer” side! It doesn’t look like them at all, and doesn’t line up with the altered “coder” side.

Yeah, like most of all people who claim to be designers, they're not designers. They're pixel-pushers. They don't know design, they know Illustrator and Photoshop.

Having worked with and competed against some such folks, I can guarantee you that they are not fighting for the same business as you. Their clients are usually small businesses who have no idea how the internet works, or clueless 'startup' guys who had an idea once and zero clue how to implement it.

So yeah, the people they sell their services to don't care about any of the stuff you and I would lose sleep over.

Filterbubbles perhaps? I never saw a website like this before. But he says he was featured a couple of times, so maybe the website was famous on some communities, but seldom seen on others.

Indian here. Finding good designers has become the bane of my existence. We don't have a strong design culture. What designers we do have are amateurs fighting for $5/hr projects on Elance. Their work is mostly borrowed and their skills limited to a handful of Photoshop effects and good Google skills.

The good designers we do have are almost never without work, and if they are available, they find other avenues to market their services than tacky, borrowed sites.

Plus, plagiarism isn't really looked down upon here. It's even the accepted norm in certain places.

I would have certainly agreed if I had of see 'and a touch of jQuery' in the copy.

That left brain/right brain design has been done to death: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=left+brain+right+brain...

"Over the years, people have informed me of websites that they felt looked similar to mine."

I found one especially ironic, where the guy has the nerve to call himself a "Creative Visionary"... He must be capable of some impressive doublethink if he's not just outright lying to his clients.

Since you only copied the navigation menu and you don't claim to be a designer, I think you fall under the category of inspired rather than copy cat :)

You could imagine using a special filter to pass your html/css/js though that applied a special transformation that you could later on try to recognize. Perhaps it renames all of the variables with some pattern or from some dictionary that you could later try to use to see if the code matched the pattern. This is along the ideas of stenography.

No. But you can just diff the code and see it's XX% the exact same code.

My guess is even basic obfuscation of his code via minification/compression would eliminate the majority of these copies. The version of his portfolio linked in the article has no obfuscation (granted it could be in dev mode)

Why do you care? Isn't it better to just focus on perfecting your art, or your code, and not waste time trying to prevent people copying it in some way.

People are going to copy anyway, everything is a copy of something. But if you create your own style so perfected that it cannot be copied without tremendous amount of time, you are already ahead of everybody else in your skill.

Also, more time to develop your skill than to waste time on trying to prevent somebody else doing the same thing.

... with a touch of CMS and jQuery! :)