Did the PSOE plagiarize the logo of a conservative party for its new foundation?

When designing logos, there is a great debate among graphic designers about where originality ends and begins.

The errors of the new logo of the Senate of Spain from the perspective of a designer

The ideas that we sometimes think are original are often the result of ideas that we have already known and that have been transformed. A strictly original design is something valuable because it is rare. But there are limits to everything, of course.

This week Pedro Sánchez presented the Fundación Avanza, a new entity linked to the Party Socialist Party (PSOE) which has been defined as a "laboratory of ideas" to protect intelligence "when reason seems to retreat from the impulse of hoaxes". That this government says that it is going to combat hoaxes, when it is dedicated to lying constantly and blatantly, seems like a bad joke.

But leaving Sánchez's audacity aside, the new foundation has been presented with a logo with very simple lines that has caught my attention. You can see it here in these photos published by the PSOE in its Flickr account.

If this logo has caught my attention, it is not because it seems original to me, but because I remembered having seen a similar logo. On June 17, 2017, the former president of the Family Forum, Benigno Blanco, presented in Madrid a new conservative political party called Proyecto Avanza. That same day, Europa Press published this photo of the event:

Here we can see the logo of this party more clearly:

The Avanza Project was dissolved without running for election. However, more recently, on February 8, 2024, La Unión City Council presented an initiative called "La Unión Avanza", with this logo:

The mayor of that town, Joaquín Gabriel Zapata García (of the Popular Party), has accused Sánchez to plagiarize this logo. Of course, the similarity between logos is clearer in the first case that we saw above. Finally, judge for yourself.