I mentioned this in other corners of the internet that I frequent, earlier today, but I feel I had to be somewhat polite in my approach of the subject. I didn’t want to come down on this person in the same way he had come down on me. Last year I came across alyricaday.com and fell in love with the work. It was something that I’d seen done before but never done this well and never to this extent. Close to 365 pieces of art that had lyrics from great bands placed over them typographically. Something clicked in me from seeing it and I sat at my computer and designed three of them almost immediately. I started trying to do one every day myself, to keep my mind fresh and keep myself busy as I was unemployed and basically watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother all day every day. I started to post them on another tumblr blog just to have them all in one place and even put a link to alyricaday.com on the page along with this message on every post: Don’t take this as an original blog. Someone has done this, and done it much better, I just enjoyed the idea. Without any promotion (besides reblogging on my personal blog) I gained a few followers. A few posts even pulled in 100+ notes and it got me excited that I was actually making something people were interested in for once. I loved doing the lyrics and I was really happy with being busy instead of lazy. I worked pretty consistently for about 3 months and then it got to the holidays and life got in the way and my computer started running really slow etc. etc. Long story short, the last post I had was probably sometime in January this year.  Fast forward to this morning. I was bored while Robin was at work so I logged into the Instagram account I’d created for LyricsAllDay and just added a bunch of people for the fun of gaining some followers on it and getting a little more attention. I even added this guy at the off chance he might see it and think it was cool that he had inspired someone to try the idea….wrong. He did see it. Instead of being stoked that someone appreciated his work enough to emulate it, he told me I was ripping off of him and then humiliated me on his own Instagram page with a screenshot of my work and plenty of comments saying how I had basically plagiarized, regardless of the fact that I had made over 70 of my own, original pieces.  Respect from 100% to 0%.  This guy somehow thinks because he thought to create an image with lyrics over it once a day for a year that he has some kind of copyright on the style. Classless and out of his damn mind is what he is. After I sent him an email (which he ignored) explaining kindly that I only loved his work and wanted to give it a shot myself he messaged me on Tumblr, again claiming it was “his work” in a douche-full manner. Apparently the guy really wanted to get a message across. Ironically, his pathetic attitude has only made me want to make more of these lyrics and maybe even just email him each one as they come along.  I had always thought of the graphic design community as a collaborative, encouraging place where people fed off each other and gave out constructive criticism to help other designers progress. Today showed me the naive optimism of that thought. Probably a good thing to learn before starting at the Art Institute next month.  We all need vices, and apparently Luke’s vice is being an asshole.