You’ve probably heard these words before “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, it’s commonly used almost as an excuse, a mantra to help one digest a big fat intellectual robbery. What you may not know is that the quote is incomplete, the original version, as it was written by english author Oscar Wilde goes like this “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… that mediocrity can pay to greatness” – A little less, let’s say, accepting than the shorter version.
There is no shortage of examples of copycatting in every imaginable industry or art branch, I’m sure you’ve spotted plenty throughout your life and there are definitely ways to safely imitate without having your mail-box presented with a cease-and-desist letter. It’s a matter of identifying what really works on a design and changing the bare minimum. It also helps if the side doing the copying is beloved, wealthier, and overall more powerful.
NDrive can trace its origin to the year 2007 as a spin-off of a digital map company and its goal has remained pretty much unchanged since then: to make navigation a commodity available to anyone, turning them into one of the first companies to deliver navigation into small digital assistant devices and later riding the smartphone revolution.
Goals aren’t the only thing that remained consistent throughout the years, from its very beginning NDrive’s corporate image has been based around clear black lettering on white canvas with a bright red dynamic “N” that fundamentally represents what they are all about, Providing Direction and a clear path from point A to B.
Hey Netflix, Stop Stealing My Moves!
You’ve probably heard these words before “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, it’s commonly used almost as an excuse, a mantra to help one digest a big fat intellectual robbery. What you may not know is that the quote is incomplete, the original version, as it was written by english author Oscar Wilde goes like this “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… that mediocrity can pay to greatness” – A little less, let’s say, accepting than the shorter version.
There is no shortage of examples of copycatting in every imaginable industry or art branch, I’m sure you’ve spotted plenty throughout your life and there are definitely ways to safely imitate without having your mail-box presented with a cease-and-desist letter. It’s a matter of identifying what really works on a design and changing the bare minimum. It also helps if the side doing the copying is beloved, wealthier, and overall more powerful.
NDrive can trace its origin to the year 2007 as a spin-off of a digital map company and its goal has remained pretty much unchanged since then: to make navigation a commodity available to anyone, turning them into one of the first companies to deliver navigation into small digital assistant devices and later riding the smartphone revolution.
Goals aren’t the only thing that remained consistent throughout the years, from its very beginning NDrive’s corporate image has been based around clear black lettering on white canvas with a bright red dynamic “N” that fundamentally represents what they are all about, Providing Direction and a clear path from point A to B.
NDrive early logos
This brings us to the other player of this story, a little company you may have happened to come across with, commonly known as Netflix. This now giant corporation, the current largest media/entertainment company in the world, with over 195 million subscribers worldwide can trace its origins to 1997 (Just two days prior to Princess Diana’s tragic death in a high-speed car crash). Its corporate image hasn’t been quite as consistent, they’ve started with a very uninspired nineties dotcom looking logo, before changing into something more attractive and familiar in the year 2000, a red background with a white strong font that pops out directly into the observant’s central cortex.
Netflix early logos
This image served them well for the next 14 years, until someone decided it was time for another change, a change into something so dynamic and simple that you can immediately associate with the Netflix brand without having to spell it out to the public. And so they did, emphasising the “N” into a single moving force of reddish glory, a symphony of movement that in a way is navigating the viewer to one of its wonderful creations.
Yeah…
No point in stating the obvious, here at NDrive we love Netflix, among our ranks you can find plenty of faithful subscribers to their service and we will forever be grateful for shows such as “Stranger Things” , but every time we turned on Netflix, we were confronted with an extremely familiar image, basically we were Netflixing without the chilling part and with time, a comment started to arise on business meetings with new potential partners: “You guys sure look a lot like Netflix”.
Yeah…
Telling the same story over and over again on how we came up with the design first got old really fast and in 2018 we updated our image once again into something we feel is a nice minimalist take on our design roots and we no longer look like a cheap design imitation of one of the world’s most recognisable brands (Although, and I can’t emphasise this enough, we came first).
This is all in good fun for us, as a small independent navigation company, one of the few left in this world of huge conglomerates, we have grown and gained many advantages from being a small and dynamic team that can change and adapt faster than most, that’s what brought us here and that’s what will keep pushing us further ahead.
But in continuing the fun light tone of this whole experience I would like to “paraphrase” comedian Norm Macdonald in a quote that he made popular, but certainly didn’t create:
“Hey Netflix, stop stealing my moves!”