I was driving down the main drag of Lafayette, CA, a well-to-do suburb just on the east side of the Caldicott Tunnel, and I noticed a new seafood restaurant named “Yankee Pier.” Being a seafood fan, that perked my interest but I was really drawn to the restaurant because of the signage, it really stuck in my head. Midway through the afternoon as I was sitting at my desk, it dawned on me why, the sign for said restaurant is a knockoff of the masthead of the tried and true New England staple, Yankee Magazine, which was founded in 1930. It is almost a requirement for every New England family to have a copy of the periodical in their bathroom.
While it is not a just “stolen”, notice the difference in swashes with the Y and the K, there is no way the designer created this without knowing about the original. I looked at the biographies of the restaurant owners and none of them have a New England backgrounds, so I wonder if they have a knowledge of this.
I also wonder if the owners of of Yankee Pier, which is quite upscale, realize that someone gave them a second hand identity…
May 31, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Actually, I imagine it was their designer who choose the font… it seems to me that it would be somehow copywritten; wonder if they paid for the right to use it?
May 31, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Unless this particular font was designed by whoever created the logotype for the magazine, it is technically okay. Fonts are bought and licensed broadly, especially in the age of digital technology.
It really comes down to bad form and lazy design. Why would an upscale restaurant want to have someone else’s masthead? It would be like Wal-Mart changing it’s logo to be a carbon copy of Chevron’s…
That might be a fun exercise though…