My Logo, Bullies and Vindication

My Logo is pretty simple. 

It was created by me and, in my opinion, accurately reflects my passion for vintage fishing lure collecting and my side hobby. While I do own a tax-id for "Chucks Tackle Box", the truth is that it is simply my hobby. I do not deal in large volumes of tackle or lures and in any given year, if I don't place a piece of tackle in my collection, I typically contact others I know who collect what I have, and finally sell it locally, or on my Etsy account. I don't sell on eBay any longer because of their constant attempts at control over my bank accounts and in any given year, I probably sell less than 2k in lures. Suffice to say, I'm the "little guy".

Being the little guy has never mattered to me in life. I more apt to stand my ground in front of men who are three times my size and will not budge. Id rather take my lumps than lose my dignity. I don't digress to bullies. I hate bullies and will always battle a bully - and that exactly what I did when a well-know big fish in the pond decided to take note of my logo.

For the record, my logo predates the bullies logo which they now use. In fact, I believe that they stole queues from my logo and in doing so, attempted to blame shift to bully the little guy, me!

First, the logo:

I have a background in art and graphics, and have a brother who is an accomplished sign artist, so its in the genes, but the logo above is really simplistic. Its not a masterpiece, but does what I need it to do.

Imagine how flattered I was when a well-know tackle house, decided to email me and threaten legal action over my logo. Knowing that I had created it myself, and now seeing that someone had the audacity to assume it was stolen without asking first, really rubbed me the wrong way. I'm a pretty decent and fair person, but I have "0" tolerance for other people's BS. I try to be fair, and expect others to be fair with me...but when a bully fires an unprovoked shot across my bow, I tend to lose all respect and an go for the throat especially when I know I've done nothing wrong.

I created my logo some time ago, around 2004, which predates the nemesis's use of the same "composition". For the sake of pettiness, lets just say that their name rhymes with "Bangs".

Ok, so your fish logo is going one way and mine is going the other.... other than that, I'd say this is a good case of "The pot calling the kettle, "Black". Going back ten years or so, The accusation was that I was using a photo they took and incorporated it into my logo. That was blatantly false. They never asked first, just accused me, and then I begged them to slander me. 

Allow me to prove my case.

I live locally to Boxborough Massachusetts, the former sight of a popular auction that use to take place there. At one time, one of the revered "Haskell Minnow" lures was going up for auction, and I had the pleasure of seeing this historical lure with my own eyes. It was resting on a plexiglass lure stand on the top shelf of a locked glass case.  I was so enamored by the lure I took several photos of it. It would fetch $104,000.00 at that auction. Several months after the auction, and thinking about the lure, i decided to create a logo using one of my photos. So for the first time, I will show you how I did that....

The Haskell Minnow as photographed

This was the only useable photo of the group that I had to work with. The others were at wrong angles, or had reflections that negated their use. Notice that even this photo has problems, the lures stand is visible on the body of the lure and there are other obstacles in the background that would otherwise prohibit use of this photo in my logo. That's where technology and graphic art comes into play.

First let me draw your attention to the seam of the lure (which allows the tail of the Haskell minnow to Spin) which happened to lie exactly at the point where the right side of the lure stand holds the lure. This is the most important part of this story and I will explain shortly.

Ok, so everything needs to "go" but the lure itself. So, by using paint commands and cloning, I am able to rid the photo of all he background static.

 Here you can see, I'm working a neutral color to essentially paint over the background and I've successfully eliminated the left lure stand against the lure by cloning other parts of the lure to make it disappear - the right side of the lure stand is more difficult.

Some detail work near the tail showing the removal of background extremely close to the body lines of the lure... painstaking work here so as to not remove the outline of the lure while tackling the other outliers and images. This has to be done around the entire perimeter of the lure and at great magnification. "Cloning" allows me to use already established patterns and colors to copy parts of the lure to other areas of  the work... Remember that seam? 

Here I've been successful at removing everything except the Haskell Minnow itself. The seam posed  huge problem and although I was able to clone other parts of the lure to eliminate the lure stand, in the act of doing that, I was unable to salvage the seam. In the photo above, you can see that the seam has been blended out of the lure. This is what differentiates my Haskell logo from the others and proves that my logo is an original and not generated from any photo except the one shown at the beginning of this post.

The image is still a photo that has essentially been painted over and masked using digital tools. it's still a photo and the background (although removed) remains "solid" - meaning that the lure is attached to the Manilla color and not a free entity, or a floating image all by itself.

Lastly, to isolate the Haskell Minnow by itself,  I use the "Transparency" command to make the entire background disappear entirely resulting in the lure (its body outline) to be the absolute edge of the image. The Haskell Minnow is now able to be incorporated into text and superimposed over it...again, my logo:

It's an exact match and the seam is not there, proving that this is an original logo and something that the bullies should have simply asked before accusing someone. They believe that they are the sole proprietors of vintage tackle imagery, and they are not, as I've shown here.

Since the creation of MY logo, they have subsequently came into using a similar logo after the fact. 

So, while they accused me of using their photo, they were engaged in stealing my original design for their use, and figured that since I must have stolen their image, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on. 

They were wrong. 

while I had good mind to return the favor, I'm not petty and imitation is the biggest form of flattery.

They know the truth.