Pine Tree Politics

Les Otten Didn’t Think We’d Notice

By Matthew Gagnon
July 1, 2009

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Alright, I am hardly breaking news here – its already been reported on by, well, everyone.  Les Otten, or more properly his web development team of INSYST New Media, have a rather nasty habit of plagiarizing.  You’ve probably read some stories about all this – hell you’ve probably even seen the famous side by side comparison of Otten’s logo with President Obama’s famous logo.  But I have been noticing a certain passivity in the coverage of this little problem, and it is troubling to me.

The problem isn’t that Otten’s team ripped of Obama’s logo, or that they have “similar” looking websites.  Its that his development team outright stole the entire design.  This wasn’t just an homage to Obama – which is pretty much en vogue everywhere in the political web development world these days – this was a literal theft of the design work of Obama’s web team, with some minor lipstick applied.

You would think developers would have learned by now that people pay attention to political websites – just ask the folks who did Marco Rubio’s website.  But nooooo.  More troubling to me is that when caught in the rather obvious copy, Otten’s campaign decided to outright lie:

We are very proud of our website, which was built from scratch, from the ground up, by a locally owned company – Insyt of Farmington, Maine. This is the website of the Les Otten Exploratory Campaign and we anticipate that additional information will be added as Les travels throughout the state listening to the people of Maine. We encourage people to visit www.lesotten.com often to follow the progress of the campaign.

The Les Otten Exploratory Campaign did not copy from anyone’s website. We built the website up from the letter “O” because Les’ last name begins with the letter “O.” We used industry standard templates placing images on the website where people’s eyes naturally follow. The color schemes of blue, red and green are prevalent throughout political websites across the United States.

Oh, nice try guys, but this wasn’t just a similar site, it was a direct knock off.  It was NOT built from scratch, it was simply redressed with Otten images and content.  Deny it all you want – what you’ll see below exposes the depth of this rip-off.

First, lets start with the logo.  I think it speaks for itself, don’t you think?  The blue background, the O shape, the faded rays in the background, the stripes – I think we pretty much all recognize this was a pretty transparent attempt to take the logo work of America’s most famous politician.  See for yourself (Image courtesy of Mike Tipping at Maine Politics):

Stunning.  I mean, points for having the stones to actually be that blatant about it.

So, the logo was pretty striking – but a lot of people noticed that the sites themselves looked pretty “similar”.  I must confess I myself didn’t realize it was a direct pirate job off the bat – I just assumed that they used similar fonts, colors, shading techniques, etc, because everyone loved Obama’s website.  This would be sketchy, but not outright criminal.

But then, I started to look at it a little more, and realized that it wasn’t just similar – it was the same.  Look at it from the 30,000 foot view:

Yes, Obama’s site has more content and some tidbits that are designed ever so slightly different, but seeing them side by side, you can already see the rip-off develop.  The headers, the footers, the sidebars, the news section – they all look basically identical with different window dressing.

Still though, it is JUST different enough to maybe pass.

…until you actually start measuring this stuff.

Take a gander at the headers:

Remarkable!!

Not only are they EXACTLY the same height with the same basic color scheme, but they have a top bar that stretches across the screen.  And in case you didn’t notice, that top bar, is ALSO the exact same height.  And I won’t even bother pointing out the right section of each which has its own little action box, curiously with the same type of design and placement.  Hmmmm.

But things get really obvious when you move to the news section of the page.  If you doubted a direct rip off before, I invite you to look at the following:

Okay.  Mysteriously this “built from scratch” website that was “constructed from the ground up” and “not copied” has the EXACT same page width.  It has the EXACT same border width on the outside of the page.  It has EXACTLY the same dimensions.  The action box on the right has EXACTLY the same shape and size.  Just the images are changed.

Oh, but not only are they the same width, they are the same height:

Amazing.  Same height.  Who would have guessed.

But then you have the footer.  Of all the knock offs on this page, this one is the LEAST similar – but only because Otten has a lot more text he needs to fit into the bottom, so it stretched.  Still there is the lighting shaded area (the developers couldn’t even be creative with the designs they DID make themselves), and below that is a cute little O shaped logo that is glowing with rays coming out from under it.

Industry template?  Please.

As somebody who has dabbled in doing this type of thing I know better than most how many of us use templates in WordPress, Drupal, or any of the other CMS’s used by site developers.  I myself have used several different themes for WordPress pages – Pine Tree Politics Included -but we either leave the credit for the design on the page, or pay a ton of money for the right to not do so.  And, of course, I’m not a candidate for the highest office in Maine, which obviously has higher standards for things like this.

But anyway, the Obama folks didn’t use some cheezy theme and re-dress it, they developed their own web presence and design, and this is a complete and total knock off of it.

Its okay to incorporate similar themes and designs – but when something is a total copy with simple redressing, and even that redressing is a bad copy of the original – that isn’t exactly creative or original.

Mr. Otten, next time, have your spokesman simply admit that your web development folks cut some corners, promise to relaunch your website with an original design, and call it good.

Tags: Les Otten, Plagarism