I used to think that the larger and more ‘corporate’ a company is, the more likely they were to ignore this sort of advice, but I’ve realised this just isn’t true: smaller websites (without access to/experience in web design) tend to make just as many mistakes. Still, it’s a shame that larger companies, with all their resources, often can’t produce sites with good information architecture.

However, I once design a website a few years back that had alot of the design elements of the upper portion of your website – the tabs and the way the letters apear to be cut out of the page’s paper. I obviously can’t claim originality as somebody else has no doubt done the same thing…which leads me to ask this question.

How do website designers, or designers as a whole, feel about design trends or little design features being ‘borrowed’? I’m not talking about ripping off somebody’s design, I mean the tabbed browsing thing you have going. I’d like to have something very similar to that.

(by tabbed browsing I mean the link at the very top, ‘Home’, ‘About’, etc)