14 DAY TRIAL // The 19-year old Hong Kong student credited for creating an awesome tribute for Apple’s late co-founder has stepped forward to admit his design was, in fact, not original.
After being contacted by various high-profile companies with job propositions, 19-year old Jonathan Mak said he was not, in fact, the first to come up with the design featuring Steve Jobs' head mashed inside the Apple logo.
Mak himself had doubts that the simple (yet later proved ingenious) combination of two existing graphical elements was an original work.
“Posting designs like this one makes me paranoid, because I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not original. I enjoyed the process regardless, but please let me know if somebody else beat me to the idea!”, he had written on Tumblir just as he was showing the design to the world.
Days later, it was revealed that a U.K.-based designer going by the screen name of Raid71 had, in fact, created a similar (therefore original) design in May.
Mak has now publicly acknowledged he was not the original creator of the design. However, he added that he did not "rip off" the British artist. He merely came to the same conclusions on his own, he said:
"I still arrived at the solution on my own, and my conscience is still clear, but I'm more than happy to acknowledge the fact that somebody did it before me," Mak said in a statement today.
On Tumblir, he blogs: “I have indeed been informed by others earlier last night … of RAID71’s work.”
“People have accused me of ripping off photos such as this one, which I have already seen when I did the Google search after having the idea. Whether you take my word for it or not, the visual similarities of these images are irrelevant to the design concept, in my opinion, and do not merit the comparison.”
“RAID71’s design, on the other hand, does indeed contain the very same idea. Although it is impossible to verify it now that all this happened, I honestly did not come across his work while searching for terms such as ‘Apple, Steve Jobs, logo, silhouette’. I did my best to ensure that the idea had not been done before,” he adds.
Editor's note I'll take Mak's design over RAID71's any day of the week.