Caprine Designs takes cut-and-paste plagiarism to new heights in the 'dee sign' world. Famous last words from Caprine Design's dee signer, Danielle Westvang: "The designs I use, colors, graphics, photos, and text on my site are originally written and designed by me... You may wish to consult the copyright laws prior to falsely accusing someone of wrong doing."

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Oh, really? First, let's make the distinction between falsely accusing and catching someone red-handed, shall we? Chances are, any designer who takes from another designer will deny it when confronted. That, however, doesn't change the facts. This online "exercise" shows the trail of evidence is all in the "code".
 

We'll begin with what Caprine Design claims is their own work, starting with their "style sheet", a type of support file which sets the colors, fonts, and styles for a web site.

In the original style sheet, written by Equine Web Design and named 'equinewebdesign.css', there are several style sheet "classes" declared that were proprietary, meaning they applied only to specific elements of Equine Web Design's layout. Namely: .dashing, .author, .ic, .tbanner, .ghost, .outerlimits... "made up" names that were unique to Equine Web Design's original style sheet. These were specific names very unlikely to be found elsewhere, and even more unlikely to be found at another web site in the same order, using the same colors.

Click the image below to compare the two style sheets:

C'mon, folks - what's the chance another dee signer would dream up a style sheet class called .outerlimits? That's the point - they wouldn't. Unless, of course, they simply used someone else's, as in the case of Caprine Design using Equine Web Design's style sheet.

Comparing the two style sheets, it's obvious Caprine Design used Equine Web Design's style sheet, right down to the letter, to obtain the look and layout of their own web site. Is it any wonder the sites, except for background color of blue, are identical? Well... it sure isn't coincidence.

Sorry, Caprine Designs, but you've just been 'made' for using Equine Web Design's style sheet, the same as if you were caught leaving my home with my television under your arm and a trail of radioactive breadcrumbs behind you. So much for 'falsely accusing'.

NOTE TO FUTURE THIEVES:
By the way, that is why Equine Web Design uses such uncommon style sheet class names, like .outerlimits, in the first place. They're as unique as fingerprints.

But, you gotta love Caprine Design's comeback of "the designs I use, colors, graphics, photos, and text on my site are originally written and designed by me". An A+ both for effort and utter HTML ignorance. A more clever thief would have known leaving such unique 'markers' - words like .outerlimits and .dashing in the all in the same stolen style sheet - is a big, fat, red flag of misappropriated content (and incompetence).
 

Now, let's take a look at the actual pixel-layout out the two design home pages - Equine Web Design's and Caprine Design's.

What are the chances two designers would lay out their design home pages identically, and the actual measurements of certain elements would be exactly the same if each page was the designer's unique creation?

Answer: none. Unless, of course, one was a duplicate of the other.

Just for kicks, let's overlay the two home pages and see what we come up with:

To the layman, the similarity is because both pages use the same style sheet, which lays out web page layout elements like heights, widths, borders, letter spacing, and font choices.
 

A good designer uses something called "image alt" tags when writing HTML code. This describes what the image you see when viewing a web page is about. In Equine Web Design's original design home page, the image alt tag read:

<img src="_images_design/designeye_264x224.jpg" width="264" height="224" border="0" align="right" alt="design - there's more than meets they eye" style="padding-right: 16px; border: 0px;">

Well, on the Caprine Design's design home page, guess what the image they used of "got milk?" says? You guessed it:

<img width="250" height="181" border="0" align="right" alt="design - there's more than meets they eye" style="border: 16px none ;" src="design_files/gotmilk.jpg">

Not only is the "image alt" HTML the same, but the text, overall layout, left menu selections, style sheet, and content has been plagiarized by Caprine Designs.
 

Well, not literally, but figuratively? Sure, why not? After all, we Yankees figure any one dumb enough to steal and deny it ought to suffer just a little for their arrogance, if not for the sheer inconvenience of having to point out the obvious to them. It's a lot like rubbing a puppy's nose in its own excrement, but much less cruel. (After all, puppies don't know any better, but dee signers do.)
 

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