YouTube is certainly a company that has plenty of resources at their disposal: so why do they feel the need to so closely emulate Pixelodeon with both their site design and video elements for their new Project: Direct video competition? Take a look at the examples below:

Video thumbnail. Click to play.

Steve Woolf has a great writeup about the whole thing over on his blog. As a curator for this past year’s Pixelodeon, it irks me to see a company like YouTube stick it to the people who have gone to great lengths to support and promote online video talent. As Steve says:

…I find it hard to believe that the YouTube designers were not aware of Pixelodeon, since we had a number of prominent YouTubers attend, and in fact we had an entire screening dedicated to YouTube (embedded above).

We created a strong brand, and YouTube appears to be “borrowing” concepts that can potentially create confusion between the two events. The chances are very remote that this is a coincidence.

I don’t know, it seems pretty jerky. This kind of thing does happens on the web pretty often from a design and concept standpoint, but not usually in a situation where two entities aren’t competing in any way. Pixelodeon promoted YouTubers; they shouldn’t get ripped off because of it.

Maybe they’re spending so much of Google’s money on legal fees that they couldn’t afford a good design team.