We wont discuss how this interview with Jon Engle came to be in our possession, but we will say this, it’s one hell of a read. If you don’t know who Jon Engle is, then you can read about him here, and here and a million other places. To summarize what those links are saying, Jon Engle used to be a popular designer, until it was uncovered that he was a fake, a thief, nothing more than a plagiarist, a design scammer. He had used stock art off of StockArt.com and claimed it at his own in logo design work, and that wasn’t even the bad part.

When StockArt.com found out they billed Jon Engle for $18,000. We say ‘billed’ it was more along the lines of ’sued’ but there’s not much of a difference because once Jon realized he was in it neck deep, he panicked, and what did he do? He goes and claims StockArt.com designers stole HIS work, and converted it into stock art…??? Ok now a lot of people bought it, and hundreds, no no, thousands of people online backed Jon up, they even setup a huge fund collection site to help him fight these so called bad guys, guess what? He was scamming everyone. He scammed StockArt, he scammed his friends, and everyone that believed him and those that donated to help him.

To quote something Jon Engle said on his site about this issue before he was caught and outed as a scammer, a lier, and a thief, before his sites were taken down, before he was banned from dozens of sites around the web and had his logo design showcases pulled down, before he became ‘that guy who lived a lie’;

I was first contacted by a stock art site in July of last year. They hit me with a bill for a whopping $18,000! I had an account with the site. Years ago I purchased an illustration of a chef’s hat for a client’s project. So, I thought this was some accounting mistake. Nope. This was a bill for new images. Very familiar images. They were images from several of my logos; 65 of them in fact. That breaks down to about $275 per image. They actually wanted me to pay them $275 for each one of MY images!

Once the sticker shock wore off the obvious question came to mind. Where the hell did they get these from? It seems as if most or all of them were lifted from my LogoPond showcase. They especially seemed to favor the ones that made it to the gallery.

My theory is that someone copied my artwork, separated them from any typography and then posted them for sale on the stock site. Someone working for the site either saw my LP showcase or was alerted to the similarities. They then prepared the bill and sent it to me. The good thing is that the bill gives me a record of every single image they took from me. That helps me gather dates, sketches, emails, etc to help me prove my case. The bad thing is that despite my explanations and proof, they will not let this go.

Now that you know the general story behind this fake designer, he had the nerves to go through with this interview only days before the house came down on this scammers head, enjoy the read!

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Interview Questions – Jon Engle of Relevant Studio

So let’s get started, in 5 words describe the designer in you to all our readers.

Guy trying to be creative.

Do you have any design rituals you practice every morning or before you start working? Some sort of warm up? You know, something weird perhaps?

If I ever saw ‘morning’ it would be a miracle. I typically start work around noon and finish around midnight. I drag myself out of bed, have a shower, grab some lunch and crank up iTunes. I like to start the day with a little Rolling Stones and go from there.

I always check and reply to my emails, take a look through Twitter to see if I missed anything and then get right to it.

How would you rate yourself as a designer on a scale of one to five, five being a holy designer among all designers?

I have my hits, I have my misses. I’d like to think of myself as a 3.5. A little cocky, but with room for improvement. Any designer who rates himself a 5 is full of it. Most of us, myself included, are much harder on ourselves than any client ever will be.

What’s your worst habit as a designer, and in your opinion, what’s your best?

My worst habit is taking too long with a design. I tend to be a perfectionist with my work. That nitpicking can sometimes cause me to forget a deadline. I’m doing much better now, but that’s been a source of frustration for me in the past. No doubt a source of frustration for a couple clients as well.

My best habit, ironically, is the same thing. I try to pay attention to details and present the best product I can. As long as I’m able to find a balance between paying attention to the design and paying attention to the deadline, then I end up with happy clients.

If you could have created any logo in the world that’s in use today, which would it be and why?

The FedEx logo. It’s brilliantly simple and simply brilliant. Lindon Leader hit on something great with that one. I had never noticed the arrow between the E and the X until my design teacher pointed out on my first day in class. I was able to see something new in a logo I thought I knew so well. To this day when I see a FedEx truck roll by I will proceed to tell random people on the street, “Hey, do you see that arrow?” I’m sure it’s annoying.

How many times, or how often do you surf the net for design inspiration, and what are some of the sites you visit?

I love to see what other designers are doing, but I feel like I’m already inspired by so many things that I don’t need to borrow inspiration from other people’s work. If we’re all inspiring each other, eventually our work will look the same. That’s just boring.

I like to visit LogoPond.com, Logofi.com, IncSpring.com and a few others. I’ll usually browse through several times per day to see new logos and comments.

What’s the most hilarious incident that made you crack up while working for a client?

A local pastor wanted a billboard to advertise the launch of his new church. The tagline was “Jesus Building People”. His idea was to have me draw a picture of Jesus actually building a person. With a hammer.

He even had a sketch prepared for me. It had a little stick figure man knealing on the ground, hands folded in prayer. Stick figure Jesus stood behind the man wearing a tool belt and holding a hammer mid-swing.

As you can imagine, the drawing would have looked more like attempted murder than the deeply spiritual concept the pastor had in mind. I tried my best to explain, but couldn’t get through to him.

I turned down the job, but he eventually found someone to do exactly what he wanted. The billboard was pasted all over the county. He even had brochures and flyers made up. It looked just as ridiculously horrifying as I had imagined. I wish I’d taken a picture.

Who was your worst client to date, and why? spill the beans, we wont tell!

We all have clients that are hard to work with once in awhile. I thought the worst clients were the one’s that didn’t pay. After I’d been designing for a couple years I learned that some client’s projects aren’t worth any amount of money.

I was hired to design a poster and billboard for a local group’s charitable event. They were going to offer free oil changes and tune-ups for single mothers on Mother’s Day. I chose a beautiful photo of a young mother holding her baby for the ad. I presented the idea to the ‘gentleman’ in charge. He took exception the fact that the photo featured a black woman. I quit on the spot.

In the design industry, who’s the one designer you respect the most, other than me of course, and who do you disregard as a designer, or dislike?

The designer I respect the most is Mike Erickson of Logomotive.net. He is without a doubt the logo master. I don’t think too many people would disagree with me on this. I’ve been an admirer of his logos for years. Every time I see his genius on display it makes me want to become a better designer myself.

Mike also helped with my new logo, and by helped I mean he did everything while I drooled all over my keyboard in astonishment. I love my new logo, in case you couldn’t tell.

Beyond that, he’s also a good friend. I always enjoy our phone calls and IM chats.

Who do I disregard as a designer? Sneaky question, but I can’t allow myself to fall into the trap of singling anyone out. I dislike any designer who takes someone else’s hard work. It’s never a good feeling to see one of your logos being used by some unscrupulous ‘artist’ trying to make a quick buck. If you have time to steal, you have time to design. If you don’t have the ability to design for yourself, I hear McDonald’s* is hiring. Get a decent, honest job, please.

*Nothing against McDonald’s or McDonald’s employees. I love your sausage biscuits.

How do you market yourself differently than everyone else?

I don’t do anything differently than most. I have a website, (www.relevantstudio.com) I post my work to the various galleries. I’ve recently started blogging (www.jonengle.com) , although I wouldn’t say that side of my online persona has fully matured yet. I have some great ideas for blog posts, but gotta get them out of my head and onto the screen.

I’d remind people not to forget traditional methods of marketing. Always carry business cards. Pick up the phone once in awhile. Network with people and remember the occasional shameless plug (see above). You know, the basics.

That concludes the interview, what can we say? Some of the answers there just confuse us, some of the answers anger us, but that’s not important, this had to be published, more people should be made aware of scammers online, they come in all shapes and sizes.

This of course is not to say all freelance designers are bad, on the contrary, there are so many talented designers online, such as Mike Erickson , David Airey, Raja Sandhu, Graham Smith and many more.

Just be careful where you get stock art from, and be careful who you hire, do a search and check up on them, ask for contact info, get everything in writing, make sure the designers email you full rights, official emails from their site address, things you can show in court in case you ever land in sticky situation.

It’s crazy, twitter has to shape up and they have to do it now. A worm/virus similar to the Stalk Daily virus that hit Twitter yesterday.

DO NOT view profiles that mention the word Mikeyy. It’s a viral virus that seems to infect people who in turn view infected profiles, the very same way StalkDaily was doing.

If you are or do get infected, please do the following in hopes of regaining access to your account and preventing this worm/virus from causing more damage;

• Change your password (we doubt the virus grabs your password, but just incase)
• Then, log out and ‘reset’ your password ‘again’
• Clear your Browsers Cache before logging back into your account.
• Use a 3rd party application to browse twitter

This should help although until Twitter steps in we’ll ALL remain vulnerable.
Again, please DO NOT click on ANY profile mentioning Mikeyy.

An example of what these posts will look like can be found via twitter search.

- @tonfue

Twitter is the new online fad, it’s the crazy these days and with a 55% increase in its userbase every single month it’s obviouse, twitter is taking over the world. Ok so maybe we exaggerate, but hey, 90% of those reading this post use twitter, and you’re all not aware of the dangers.

Phishers, scammers and hackers alike are always the first to take advantage of a new social network that’s exploding onto the scene, as is evident recently with many phishing attacks circulating around twitter. So here’s what you need to do to stay safe and to be sure you’re not tricked into losing your account!

Don’t use the same password on you twitter account and email address you registered with, if all else fails and you lose your twitter account to a phisher, you don’t want to lose your email too! Especially if it’s one that contains more important emails with login info to other sites, servers, maybe paypal details? Be very very careful.

There are many sites online now that grab your browser cookies and then extracting user info from it, sensitive information like email addresses, usernames and passwords so be sure to clear your browser cookies regularly.

One site that’s doing this is Stalk Daily now we wont link to this site and are asking you to please NOT visit it, as it’s run by phishers, a bunch of scum that are stealing peoples accounts on twitter in order to advertise their site and god knows what else. Instead, if you’ve been hit by these phishers please email phishing-report@us-cert.gov with information regarding their ILLEGAL activity. Explain how visiting their site led to them illegally accessing your twitter accounts and posting messages to advertise their services, which in turn attract other victims and so on.

Below is an excerpt from an article @KodeSpark wrote recently;

How do you protect yourself?

I can’t guarantee any of the methods outlined below but they should help

• Do not visit the account’s page or the website stalkdaily.com
• Do not browse twitter via your browser, use a client instead
• Do not follow anyone ‘till the worm account is banned
• Do not add the @ to stalkdailywoo if you tweet about it
• Warn your followers about the #Hijack and send a @reply to twitter management

These people need to be stopped, and you need to be careful while using an ever growing service such as twitter, make sure you’re using a unique password for twitter only, and never EVER give any service that is not affiliated with Twitter your username and password. This goes for any service online, phishers are weakest when you’re being careful and don’t get fooled. Always check the websites URL to make sure it’s the site you’re meaning to log into and never give out your info to sites you’re not 100% sure about.

Browse safely - @tonfue

I found a recent post on Toni’s blog to be very informative and it brought up some strong valid points about professional designers having the same inspiration sources. Jacob Cass was noted as having designed a similar logo to a previous 2 year old design. Regardless of whether he was inspired by it or not, Toni asks some simple important questions I think designers need to answer;

are designers so much alike that we can’t seem to come up with new concepts? Are we all so influenced by the same sources of inspiration? or are we now taking advantage of our high profiles and using that to bend the rules?

- Toni Z

Good read, nice find, eye opening questions.

I can’t even call these teenagers real designers. They’re young immature 16 and 17 year old kids running around claiming to be professional designers charging clients outrageous prices only to end up proving these clients with rubbish.

One teenage Designer making the rounds lately on many design communities and news feeds is Julie Kapral, better known as JulieK. She’s 16, and talented, we also apologize for our previous comments about her work, we were in no position to judge her. Just goes to show that even though very few in number, there are naturally talented young designers out there. Thanks to Toni for dropping us an email and enlightening us.

But for the most part, how on earth do these kids get a hold of software like Photoshop and then fool clients into hiring them? We’ve said this before and we have to say it again, to all end clients, people looking for designers, these young designers can not be trusted and should not be taken serious. These kids think they can slap up a portfolio, a couple designs and people will take them seriously. They don’t respect deadlines, they don’t respect other designers work and they certainly don’t care about the quality that you end up getting.

The verdict? Don’t give these young impostors a chance, they’re fake designers for the most trying to make a quick buck to go spend on jelly beans and pink stuffed animal toys. Make sure they can do what they say they can do, and then after providing you with enough evidence that they’re capable, pay them, not before.

Technically the company, Bolidea, is not a boat, so it can’t really sink, but as Toni of SD was quoted;

they just boarded the Titanic

There’s nothing worse than a dishonest company, one lacking morals, any sort of Ethics, one that’s willing to lie, steal and cheat to save a few bucks and get their own way…wait, there is. A designer who’s hired by this company that has the same shameful traits as those listed above, David Pache of Dache. We could go on about how to avoid such companies but this time we’re going about it a different way. We’re going to share an article with our readers about this company, but please note that even after all this had taken place, they still argue that it’s their right to use the logo, they provided a flimsy excuse that doesn’t even hold water too.

So to learn more about how scammers might operate, how designers slip up and ruin their reputation, how ethics are thrown right out the window when it comes to money, have a read about Dache Screwing Bolidea, who by the way in turn tried to screw a bunch of designers. Very weak.

A well known Black Hat SEO - turned logo designer that goes by the nickname Tonfue (Toni) has dropped a bomb on a couple plagiarists, a popular logo designer that goes by the name Dache and America.edu

This is not the first time Logo Designers such as Toni and logomotive have had their work ripped and used off of Logo Pond, but with high profile individuals and Organizations/Institutes doing the ripping, one question begs to be answered; When will all this cyber crime, this cyber theft, this plagiarism end?

Hey guys, today we decided to touch up what you should and should not do when it comes to running a website and driving it to success, what you should think about design wise, why not to trust freelance designers, and how to better target your site to into clicking more.

With the roll out of a new website; the need for an experienced graphic designer is becoming more and more prominent as it relates to how your customers perceive your website, navigate within it and ultimately purchase from it. Following are some tips we have been able to put together to better position your website so it converts at a much higher percentage of the traffic that is being driven to your site:

The use of the term “Instant Affinity“: This is a term that we use for the “that’s what I’m searching for” reaction that customers sometimes have when then find new sites. It’s an important (albeit subjective) measure because many studies have shown that visitors make a judgment about a website in a fraction of a second; normally within 5-8 seconds of landing on a website. If you do not have INSTANT AFFINITY as it relates to your branding and a value proposition message; then you are not maximizing the use of your HTML CONTENT fields to drive home your message while instilling confidence in your visitors to continue to navigate/browse and ultimately purchase from your website.

In our experience, we have found that crisp, clean, well laid out looking sites, with an appropriate image related to your product offerings and a 7-12 value proposition, tend to work well together. We’d suggest shorter landing pages, so that no scrolling is required or at least very little; this is the norm in the industry; you want to keep your HTML CONTENT landing page images to a height/width that conducive in displaying a promo about a particular category WHILE still showing product above the FOLD (Above the fold = what customers see initially after clicking on a link without the need for said customer to scroll down to view product(s)).

Here is an example of a well designed landing page:

Next is Credibility. We’re all wary of scams (like the trafficcoleman.com scam) on the web and due to this it’s important that your customers equate quality of graphic design with quality of product so trust/loyalty can ensure to drive conversion. Thus a certain level of graphic design sophistication is needed so your site SCREAMS credibility! The chances are if your design was “homemade” then it also looks that way to your customers. Wed suggest using an experienced graphic design company when putting together any marketing materials; such as DSR related promo inserts to your eBay customers, HTML CONTENT execution on your website, email targeted campaigns, etc…

But here’s the tricky part, in doing so you don’t want to fall for a scam yourself. There are so many new designers popping up every day, any young kid with a free download of PhotoShop or similar graphic software considers themselves a professional designer, purchases a domain for $10 and sets up his online design company. Many then go to setup a portfolio that does not even belong to them, ripping designs left and right, logo’s from logo galleries, css sites from css galleries and so on. It’s appalling but sadly it’s strongly in effect as we speak.

Also, freelance designers force a 50/50 payment system where you pay 50% of the full project costs before they start, then the remaining 50% after everything is finished, many times they don’t finish it and you’re stuck chasing them and filing chargebacks on top of that wasting your time.

We suggest you don’t hire a designer that does not have a real contact page with address or phone numbers, or office details of some sort. Serious designers that wont give you a hard time wont mind providing their personal details for contact purposes. Use Escrow when you can so you’re safer when it comes to dealing with payments and please, whatever you do, ask to have the designer call you so you at least have a number and know they are really who they say they are.

Freelance designers are NOT the way to go, they’re for the most part untrustworthy so aim to deal with graphic companies rather than individual freelance designers. Companies may charge more but you get your monies worth!

Lastly is Focus. This feeds directly into ‘clutter’ and how customers perceive your site. If there is TOO MUCH going on in terms of links, flash animation, promos, animated .gifs, scrolling advertisements, etc…then you value proposition of who you are and why customers should shop or continue to browse your site; will be last in translation due to a cluttered site. Like Einstein said,

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”

We’ve found that an effective concept in any number of web marketing areas (as mentioned above). We feel that graphic design should contribute to usability and simplicity by helping those customers determine where there next clicks are going to occur on your website; based upon what your customers are looking for. We’re huge fans of simplifying navigation options by predicting what the majority of your site visitors will be looking for via the use of KEYWORD reports from your Google Analytics account as well as by using your upcoming NEXTOPIA advanced search module which contains a REPORT section that delivers to you an even more robust list of search words by your customers; then act upon these finds and then offer visually prominent links to those items; for example the use of images on your BRAND menu.

With that, you’re one step closer to driving your site steady on the road to success, good luck!

At Kirupa forums, you’ll find some of the most talented flash designers around, it’s really an interesting place that we have checked out, lots of creative people there and the contests seem to be of the highest caliber. Thumbs up there! But, we are sadly reporting what seems to be a black patch, or is it a black cloud, that lingers over this great forum. Members, who believe it is ‘their’ forum, seem to have a venomous way with new members. Bashing them? Embarrassing them? Calling them names? There must be something wrong here. Time to find out I guess.

Are new members falling victims to cyber bullying and forum trolling/flaming by older members? Are Kirupa.com’s admins/mods allowing this to go on under the radar so as to keep older members happy? We’re not sure, but from the screen shots we were sent by one new member there, we’re sickened as to how things were left.

Threatened? Called names? Disrespected and ridiculed, some might think we’re exaggerating, but trust me, we’re not. Now we looked into it to see if this sort of thing has happened before, and to our disbelief, it has, several times. Why are people allowed to be offensive if it clearly states otherwise in Kirupa’s rules?!?!!? Come on Kirupa, do something about it, they’re messing up a beautiful and respectable forum there! Screenshots sent by the victim show comments such as “have you missed an additional zero perhaps” (for the budget) and things like, “Someone didn’t have their froot loops this morning…” as well as accusations of trying to cheat people and scam them, noting that some kirupa members look out for each other?! All this because someone had a low budget of $150?

The section highlighted above shows a topic in question, $150 for a simple edit of a tool it seems, this is the topic in question, the one that was deleted by request of the topic starter because he was slammed with hate comments for offering an on budget price? Are you kidding us? Why have a LOW PROFILE section if you expect people to pay $x,xxx!?

This is beyond being rude and offencive, maybe someone from Kirupa would care to enlighten us? Maybe explain how things are done there and why new members don’t feel welcome. We’re sad to report that a great forum with so much creativity like that is now on our black list of bad services.

If you want to look for help, advice, and not get hated on, Kirupa, sadly, does not seem to be the place for that.

We were SHOCKED to have recieved several detailed emails regarding Kim Hughes (an online real estate virtual assistant, owner of kimhughes.com). Kim Hughes has been accused of fraud, scamming users and we will explain exactly what these emails detailed and why we are in disbelief. (We will also contact KimHuges.com and ask for clarification on this serious matter)

The emails consisted of email snippets and screenshots, detailing conversations between clients (4 in total emailed us this week) and KimHuges.com (we wont disclose email address, screenshots, or private info until we have heard from Kim Huges on this matter.)

After the clients consulted with kimhughes.com about Branding and Marketing packages, one also asked about Blog marketing/design/installation, these clients were presented with a quote, for the fees. As per the emails received, that will go on record if need be, The clients were all asked to pay 30% of the sum to start off with, which they all did as they felt comfortable dealing with this online real estate virtual assistant! Suprise suprise, after that, their emails were ignored, calls ignored also and when someone did answer, they were informed that ‘Kim’ would get back to them, and to leave a message?? Come on people…are you serious? They would inform the clients that it would take time for their orders to be processed (right, how that is possible we don’t know) - only to wait several days with no reply.

This is not good news for the Online Real Estate Virtual Assistant community, because up until now they have held a clean record as being honest hard working individuals/companies. Never have we heard of such complaint.

We hope Kim finds the time to email us or comment back in a reply to these 4 individuals, who’s personal information we are only willing to disclose with Kim herself for clarification reasons.

A sad day on the web, to know that Scam’s happen in all fields online, not just the well known ones. Here I was thinking of hiring an online real estate agent next month.