Reflecting on Sweet Spot's branding and how I inadvertently plagiarized SwingVision

With the phenomenal rise of the AI tracking app SwingVision, I'm embarrassed but absolutely willing to admit that it looks like I totally stole their logo and branding for my capstone project Sweet Spot.

In all transparency, I hadn't heard of the app until today, when I discovered it at my gym. I was horrified, but for a different, egotistical reason:

"Did this app steal my logo!?"

I did some digging on their X (formerly known as Twitter) to see when their app released and, alas, SwingVision (and its branding!) predated my design career, let alone my case study.

For me, this discovery came with two lessons:

1. Market research is important. I'm sure if I had just did a quick Google search of "tennis," "app," "tennis ball logo," etc., I would have discovered the soon-to-be award-winning app that is SwingVision.
2. Sometimes, design is objective. Even if you don't believe me, I swear up and down that my design had come completely independently from SwingVision's brand. A lot of the time, design is subjective, but it can also follow patterns and be formulaic.
3. A bonus lesson: Validation. I laid out my design process and came to almost the exact same conclusion as SwingVision's design team. That feels good (no matter how embarrassing)!

While my case study is a proof of concept, SwingVision is very real and very awesome. If you haven't already, go and try it! I get nothing out of hyping up this app, I just think it's really cool.