I recently received a pitch from Vancouver-based CEO of Justbought.it Adarsh Pallian. Pallian’s design company is working on a shopping application that allows users to create shopping lists and share their Black Friday purchases via Twitter and Flickr. Nevertheless, when I clicked through to check out the site I was met with something very familiar. Although the company had already received some buzz, it wasn’t the product features that I recognized, it was the aesthetic. Justbought.it’s image is the same as the icon used for open source media player Songbird.

It is unclear whether Justbought.it is intentionally borrowing the Songbird logo or whether they’ve been hoodwinked by a contract designer, but one thing is certain, this is definitely the Songbird image. Ironically, when the icon was first commissioned for the Songbird 1.0 release last year, community members were unhappy with the new design direction as documented here and here.

While Justbought.it is clearly a useful service, it’s hard to get over the fact that they’re being represented with someone else’s brand image. Furthermore, Pallian Creative’s site boasts a Tweetizen badge with a Wayne Pate illustration. For everyone’s sake I hope these images have been obtained through a stock site. Even with royalties paid, Twitter’s fail whale caused quite a stir after artist Yiying Lu admitted that she’d been paid less than $20 for an iconic image that has gone on to define web 2.0 site downtime.