A friend of a co-worker sent me an interesting link today. It’s the first time I’ve seen a blatant rip-off of my design work.
Here’s my design for the Getty Images homepage (scaled down quite a bit):

And here’s Hypeful.com’s Top 27 Albums of 2007 not-so-original header graphic:

At least he put his own touch on it by adding reflection to the type. I think that’s a bad call, but hey, he’s the designer.
UPDATE Jan 3: The Hypeful.com website seems to be down is back up. I sent a polite email to the site’s owner to see what gives. We’ll see if he responds….
UPDATE Jan 4: Well, I didn’t receive an email response, but as of this morning, he has swapped out the pilfered graphic for something else. ‘Nuff said.
UPDATE Jan 10: I eventually received a very friendly and apologetic email from Lucas, the site’s owner. It seems that an acquaintance of his created the graphic, and Lucas was unaware of the design’s origins. Coincidentally, I’ve really been enjoying Lucas’s excellent music site, so plenty of good has come of all this.