[Disclaimer: I used to work at MetaDesign and am still friends with many of the people who work there. I am also still friends with many of the people who left MetaDesign for Ammunition.]

Some of you have already heard my rant about this, but I've calmed down from my initial shock and would like to engage in a civilized discussion about the legality and integrity of Ammunition's decision to showcase on its new website all of the projects that Brett Wickens and Matt Rolandson led while they were Creative Director and President, respectively, at MetaDesign. I counted at least ten projects for which the client had actually hired MetaDesign, not Ammunition, but which are currently displayed in Ammunition's portfolio in addition to having already been on MetaDesign's portfolio for the last several months/years.

Now, it would be one thing if Wickens and Rolandson showcased these projects on their own personal websites; Adobe did, after all, hire Wickens and MetaDesign to design its CS1 and CS2 packaging. It did not, however, hire Ammunition, and while Ammunition attempts to give credit to MetaDesign via a small rollover link at the bottom of each project page, I still find this misleading or, at the very least, confusing.

Legality
I do not purport to have the slightest inkling about what kind of legal contracts were agreed to between the parties involved. Perhaps it is perfectly legal to cite projects in this way, especially since Ammunition founder Robert Brunner came from Pentagram, which operates more as a collective of design teams each led by a principal and each managing its own client accounts than as a single design unit. (When Brunner left to found Ammunition, he took his whole team at Pentagram--and ostensibly his clients--with him.) Perhaps this is the same situation that causes confusion over who designed the first Apple mouse in 1980. At the time it was Hovey-Kelley Design, but David Kelley later merged his company, David Kelley Design (I'm still unclear as to whether this is the same legal entity as Hovey-Kelley Design or a subsequent incarnation of it), with three other firms to create IDEO. So did IDEO create the first Apple mouse if Hovey and the other original team members do not and potentially never have worked there?

Integrity
Even if it were technically legal (with the appropriate credit citations), is it fair? What is integrity when it comes to design, given that so many products are the result of teamwork and designers are so fickle when it comes to firm loyalty? Wikipedia defines integrity as "the quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions." Another definition describes it as "adherence to a code of values; utter sincerity, honesty, candor; completeness." Honesty seems to be a big player here, and perhaps that is why I still feel uneasy about the way Ammunition has represented MetaDesign's work, even though I can convince myself that it could be totally legal. If Ammunition were a person, I can picture him walking around in borrowed clothing and taking all of the credit when others compliment his sense of style, while anyone who bothered to look at the tags would find someone else's initials stitched into them.

When has something like this happened in the past, and how have people reacted to it?

How does a design firm brand itself if its identity is really just a collection of different brands associated with its principals and their past alliances?

It's a little strange (and doesn't necessarily help our reputation in the business world) that this article chose to share the story about the High-Tech CFO Action Figure to demonstrate what design thinking can do, but hey, the more people that know about us, the better....