You've just designed a logo and all seems well. Until you see it on google or any design website, and it turns out it's a very similar logo to another company. Sometimes exactly the same as in the case of Katch Kuwait, with just a color and language change
The top design agencies will make sure to craft a logo that identifies your brand and connects with your ideal consumer. You love Apple and if anyone attacks Apple, it’s an attack on you. Same thing for Nike, Levis, and literally any brand that you identify with
Disclaimer: We have no hate against Katch. We are just stating that the logo has been 95% copied from a Malaysian food brand.
We’ll keep it simple. The designer who designed the logo of Katch just went to Behance, searched “food logo” and found an interesting logo design made by Bazil Zieel. They were inspired by it so much that they simply picked it out, changed the bowl color, and wrote “Katch!”. Boom, the brand loved it and went with it.
The original logo was a rebranding done by Dahmakan (means ‘Have you Eaten” in Malay) by Bazil. The company rebranded itself from “Dahmakan” to “Pop Meals”, as to shift from healthy meals to popular meals to capture a larger consumer base. In that regard, Katch got lucky that the logo isn’t in use anymore. But it’s still not okay to copy other designer’s logos
As a brand, you don’t want to be in a position where you get a logo designed, but it turns out it's similar to an already existing logo. Follow these steps to make sure your logo is unique,
This is the first step. Go to Google Image Search and upload the logo JPEG on it. You’ll get a ton of results and spot the differences in the results. Do the results have similar designs as yours? And worst, is the logo similar to another company in the same industry as yours?
Back to the drawing board
You can’t see any matching logo here. Google didn’t do a great job in this case. You can also give TinEye a try, and find if there are matching logos out there. Now we move to Step 2 to find out if our logo is unique
When Google can’t find the right results, we go towards design inspiration websites. Behance and Dribble are two of the most popular design sites where designers upload their work, get inspired and clients find new talent to work with.
But we’ll find if our logo is unique or not
We would need to search for keywords related to our industry. In the case of Katch, we’ll search for “food logo”. And right there, we already see the logo. When we search it on Dribble, we’ll see it there too.
The Behance reference and Dribble reference
These 2 steps are more than enough to find a matching logo. But to go even deeper, we do Step 3
BrandDB is a global database of registered brands.
You can filter by Image > Shape > NonVerbal and review the results
That’s it. Now just look at the logos and see if they are similar to yours.
Unfortunately, the only solution to copycat logos is to be proactive and thorough. You should always examine your design with a critical and discerning eye—don't be afraid to ask for outside feedback, too. The best way you can avoid being copied is to ensure that your design is original and unique from the get-go. And if nothing else, having a complex logo will at least make it harder for someone else to rip off something similar.
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Ali Saeed is a strategy-focused graphic designer and marketer based in Kuwait, with four years of experience in shaping social brands, company profiles, and presentations. His foray into web design and development is driven by a keen understanding of marketing and business principles, enabling him to deliver design solutions that are not only visually compelling but also strategically effective.
Send an email if you'd like to collaborate :)
