An Alibaba executive has pointed out the uncanny resemblance between a few modern companies’ logos and ones printed in the 1989 design book, “Trademarks & Symbols of the World: The Alphabet in Design.”

In at Tweet, which announced “Nothing is original,” Spencer Chen, Alibaba’s vice president of marketing and business development, posted samples of the book’s illustrations showing near identical logos to those of some modern companies, according to Inverse.

Nothing is original, esp. in #design. (btw, these are NOT the logos of Medium AirBNB, Flipboard, and Beats)pic.twitter.com/JNDsM0rhod — Spencer Chen (@spencerchen) April 27, 2016

He showed a photo of what is currently known as Beats Audio’s lowercase “b” logo, but the version was actually created for a different company in 1971. He also posted Flipboard’s familiar “stacked blocks” logo created in 1981, Medium’s logo made in 1977 and AirBnB’s looping “A” from 1975.

Twitter users were quick to react and point out that such similarities in design are not an impossibility since there are a limited number of letter combinations that can be used in logo creation.

@andreasklinger Agree. Not making any strong commentary, net-positive or negative. Just stating something that I always thought was obvious. — Spencer Chen (@spencerchen) April 27, 2016



One commenter even posted a link to a blog entry comparing a number of other modern logos that overlap in design.

While Chen agreed with the observations, he said he still finds such similarities to not merely be inspiration.

@imkialikethecar Yea, not even inspired. Like…literally, the, same 😳 — Spencer Chen (@spencerchen) April 27, 2016

Other commenters were able to find in the book the universally known Bluetooth symbol and an owl image created in 1969 by Erik Ellegaard Frederiksen for the Association of the Swedish Book Trade that looks like the Hootsuite logo.