Chicago designer Randall Kramer sent me a picture of a brass-plated fireplace screen he made for a New York apartment. I was impressed.
He says he was inspired by Edgar Brandt’s Art Deco-era designs for Au Bon Marche. So I looked for a picture of Brandt’s work and found this photo of one of the panels he’d made for the Paris store, now relocated to a building in Charlotte, NC [courtesy of ohncox’s flickr photostream]
You can’t help but admire Kramer Design Studio’s craftsmanship on its piece, but when you note how close a copy it is to the original, it’s a little deflating to check out Mr. Kramer’s blog post, wherein he goes off on the various entities he says have appropriated his designs [among them, Crate & Barrel]. He writes:
If there’s one thing that really gets me going -
It’s the subject of KNOCK-OFFS.
Why?
Because to me- it’s the lowest form of “flattery”.
It becomes an excuse for lack of Creativity.
There’s thousands of brilliant ideas floating around in our brains-
waiting to be developed- so why steal someone elses?
Indeed.
Unless, of course, it’s exactly what your client wanted.
And on the intellectual property front, it helps if the designer of the original is long dead, and therefore unavailable to blog about it, to say nothing about litigating.
