Pilipinas Kay Ganda: A Mere Imitation?

Filipinos are good at renditions. Some think it’s a bad thing when Filipinos copy others’ ideas and pass them off as their own. Others think it takes a lot of creativity to get away with putting a spin on something that’s not yours and passing it off as your own.

If you ask me, it always depends on how it’s done. There is no fixed answer to the question of whether getting inspiration from other people’s original ideas is good or bad. Practically speaking, there really is no “original” idea; it just depends on who took the first effort to copyright or register it.

And we all know that we draw inspiration from life and from everybody else around us. All ideas come from a myriad of experiences that are not always just our own. However, when you take credit for something which you expressly just copied somewhere else, that’s a different thing entirely.

When I found out that the logo of the new campaign “Pilipinas Kay Ganda” was an outright rendition of Poland’s own tourism brand, I felt disappointed. It’s alright to draw inspiration from somewhere, but to copy all the design details is just tacky and tasteless. It’s a campaign for our country; don’t we want to have the right to be proud of it? We at least want to come up with something we can say is 100% Pinoy, yes?

Here’s the logo of our Pilipinas Kay Ganda campaign:

…And here’s Poland’s original version:

The font style, colors, the water waves, and even the tree are way too similar for this to be a mere coincidence. The advertising agency responsible for the alleged imitation is washing its hands.

This saddens me because I know so many brilliant artists who would have made a spanking campaign. And yet here we are: the Philippines ends up looking like a fool once again.

Filipinos are NOT stupid. Unfortunately, the few of us who happen to be the exception to that statement are the ones who got to work on the above logo.