Superficial
But it's so tame! If they'd really copied Das Reg, that name might've been "IT ClickBait Mill" and the title might've been "External storage smells a bit off"
Fake Newspaper steals Reg design to spruik storage upstart
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but perhaps whoever designed the website for storage upstart Weka.io has gone a little too far: when Reg operatives decided to read beyond our story on the company, we found its website appears to have borrowed ours! The offending bit of Weka's site is its Fake Newspaper, “IT News …
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Friday 14th July 2017 04:39 GMT Amorous Cowherder
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal" , said Picasso supposedly. Web design is artistry, and like any other line of work it has a large number of lazy people simply nicking other people's ideas which simply proves they never really had any true creativity or understanding of the skills they profess to have. In any business sphere there are a small percentage of people who are world class, then a big chunk of hard working types who know their stuff and then a huge proportion riding the coattails of the aforementioned.
As an aside, can anyone explain why web design was ever considered an IT skill?! While the rest of us toiled in the computer rooms of companies and schools, everyone else scoffed at us until the WWW explosion in the 90s and suddenly IT wasn't geeky or nerdy anymore when they saw how much skilled IT people earned behind the scenes. All of a sudden it was an excuse for artist types to look "retro-geek trendy" by saying they were working in IT when they were basically graphic designers working on computers.
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Friday 14th July 2017 07:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
As an aside, can anyone explain why web design was ever considered an IT skill?!
There's the design and then the mechanics to implement it and make it work.
For design, you best use someone who spent years in school learning about it (yes, it IS a skill despite what people say, and there is lots to learn - usability, for instance, is clearly not an IT skill).
For translating design into something that works well online (as in "not using the full 4000x3000 5MB of that wonderful frontpage picture" and other things that marketing types try to inflict on us) you need someone with technical expertise who speaks enough "design" to communicate with the designer (which, incidentally, also pre-supposes you use a designer who has an idea of technology - speeds things up).
Both are skills, but they are separate talents that do not always reside with the same person.
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Friday 14th July 2017 08:30 GMT Aqua Marina
Sprechende designer?
"you need someone with technical expertise who speaks enough "design" to communicate with the designer "
Something I've clearly never learned looking at the years I've spent banging my head against the wall with designers who do not understand the concept of DPI. A typical example:-
Designer: I need all my photography images to be supplied at 300 DPI.
Me: What resolution?
Designer: 300 DPI......
Me: 6" x 4" at 300 DPI, 10" x 6" at 300 DPI, A1 at 300 DPI?
Designer: Look, they just need to be 300DPI then they are good enough to print out.
Me: You've saved 1TB of JPGs twice and filled up the entire NAS, one lot at 96DPI and the other at 300 DPI, but they are both just 3800 x 2100 images.
Designer: That's because the ones at 96DPI are for use on the website, the 300 DPI are to be printed.
Me: But they're identical, you only need one set.
Designer: No, they're different resolutions, those are the same resolution as your monitor, those as your printer.....
And many many more....
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Friday 14th July 2017 05:10 GMT as2003
Eh, give them a break
I can't even find it on their website so its clearly not a core design element, just a quick bit of throwaway design. Besides, the value of the reg is in it's content, not its design.
And who is stealing design from whom? The 'red masthead' style of tabloid existed long before El Reg ever did. It's even been stated by Reg staffers that the design intentionally apes the British tabloid.
Just take it as a compliment.
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Friday 14th July 2017 12:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Eh, give them a break
Being able to see Reg specific links though... is not on. Copying/taking/stealing in such a way is exactly that.
Now had they re-drawn/markup'ed by hand, then they would not have copied the "m3" link, and it would be mainly their own work, while imitating a design.
Photographing/copy pasting someone else's work, while presenting it to customers as your work, takes personal effort to give the idea you did the work to the customer. It's a decision to pass off, not a mistake.
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Friday 14th July 2017 08:23 GMT Alan J. Wylie
The Delirium Brief
On a very slightly related note, Charlie Stross's "The Delirium Brief" came out yesterday, and mentions The Register within the first couple of chapters.
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Friday 14th July 2017 15:05 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Re: The Delirium Brief
but frankly the current news cycle is (Neocon) Delirium Brief enough for me
Charlie had to re-write it: "BREXIT broke my next Laundry novel"
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
