If you want or need the backstory to this letter, start here.

To the proprietors of A List Apart and Font Deck,

When you meet someone who gives the impression of being shit, anything else he says or does tends to confirm that first impression. In spite of this risk, I’m writing to explain the existence of two “ripped” sites, for which I claim responsibility, and to offer a limited apology.

I am an academic by trade – and therefore one who takes intellectual property very seriously – and an amateur web developer (if even that’s not too grandiose) only by accident. When I decided with a few colleagues to try to launch an open access e-journal, we started looking around for examples of how to do such a thing. Most instances in the academy are not very impressive, so we started looking elsewhere.

In the process of researching best practices I discovered ALA, Font Deck, and some other impressive sites, built by people who obviously know what to do with long-form text on the web. And so, to learn how it was done, I copied and studied the work of recognized masters, pared with different CMSes and parked at cognate domains, to see what I could learn. It was something I deliberately undertook as an exercise, fully aware that I could not claim any of the designs or code in the site that our little venture will eventually announce.

When Greg Hoy found the parrot of ALA and then thought that I switched it (because he was “on to me,” I guess) to a parrot of Font Deck, the irony is that, if he’d known where to look, he could have found two or three other borrowed designs (none his) that would probably have been just as recognizable.

It’s an unlikely line of defense, but believe me when I say that the intent was not to steal anybody’s work. It was simply to learn from it and then to put it away. Greg may remember that, in early 2011, I submitted a proposal to license the code behind Happy Cog’s Cognition blog. (We had about $1K to get started, not $100K.) He declined, and I decided then that I would just have to figure out how to build the site myself.

My mistake was in assuming – quite stupidly, I see in hindsight – that a series of experiments tucked away in an unclaimed corner of the web were anything less than live sites. For that I can only apologize. I am thoroughly embarrassed, and suitably chagrinned, at the way things played out.

Think of me as a copycat, if you want. Think of me as a thief, if you must. Alternately, think of me as a student who decided to enroll in the school of Hoy, Zeldman, Jon Tan, et al, to try to learn how a good web site is built. I bought a few books (including in the A Book Apart series), paid for some online tutorials (e.g. from Ryan Irelan), and then dissected, studied, and rebuilt some of the strongest real-world examples I could find.

People once learned BASIC by typing out lines of code from a magazine. Millions of writing students compose a “Shakespearean” sonnet. My own high school drafting teacher gave us a wrench and had us draw it to spec in AutoCAD. More than a few aspiring typographers have read Robert Bringhurst and then mimicked the layout of his book in LaTeX or HTML or whatever (see Tim Brown’s lovely article on ALA earlier this year, for example). The point is that aping the pros is a pretty traditional way of learning a craft.

The one thing that amuses me about the whole episode is that a president of a major web design group, self-described as “the best digital design firm in all of the lands” to thousands of Twitter followers, should feel anything at all for a half-baked, obvious copy of ALA. (Who in their right mind would use one of the most recognizable magazines on the web for their own new journal?) Imagine if Bringhurst himself publicly called out all the grad students who have used The Elements of Typographical Style to style their dissertations.[1] It’s hard for me to imagine that he’d be fussed.

Here’s a snapshot of traffic on the site most people found from the time it went up, less than a month ago, to yesterday.

Yesterday and today I took down every last unlicensed image and line of code that had been tucked away for private study at obscure URLs. You will not find any at scripturetheology.ca, .com, .net, .org (etc) in the future, including after its official launch. As for the ligature in our logo, I rest in the confidence that we spent a third of our seed money licensing the font of the excellent designer who made it.

Greg asserts that I am missing the point. Perhaps so. I also believe that imitation is how people have always learned, and that it is deeply imbedded in the structure of the internet in particular. To my mind the foul occurred somewhere along the boundary line between public and private use,[2] and I regret having given the impression of encroaching on the interests of Happy Cog or Font Deck, whose adherence to high standards of web design I continue to admire.

Sincerely, DRD

PS – As for the ironic use of religious language, let him the one has never used an illegal copy of Adobe Photoshop throw the first stone.