Found this on ynet.news:

Despite the obvi­ous sim­i­lar­i­ties between the sites, Netanyahu’s Spokesman Yossi Levi claimed that the design of Bibi’s web­site was not copied from Obama’s site.
“We view the com­par­i­son as a com­pli­ment,” Levi said. “The guide­line of the Likud’s online cam­paign is open­ness and max­i­mal trans­parency to the public, with max­i­mal public par­tic­i­pa­tion in the elec­tion process.”

So not every­one in Netanyahu’s camp is so gra­cious to admit they actu­ally looked at Obama’s web­site for inspi­ra­tion. And I’m being very kind here — this looks like a shame­less rip-​off to me.

Well, Nentanyahu’s always been smart and prag­matic. I’m not sur­prised to see him jump on a pop­u­lar for­mula.

I noticed a much less sig­nif­i­cant and promi­nent (but still obvi­ous) exam­ple of this in a local elec­tion in San Fran­cisco:

http://​www.​julio​ramos.org/

That orange and black logo set in ITC Book­man and Arial looks like a pair of pliers on a pig as we say in Bel­gium. ;)

Wow. Even the hor­i­zon­tally flipped layout is due to the right-to-left read­ing of Hebrew.

I knew I should have included Hebrew as well! Maybe next time…

It is a dif­fer­ent coun­try. I’ll give it a pass. In Amer­ica, no politi­cian should be this fool­ish. But some­one in every demo­c­ra­tic coun­try is going to just on some­thing Obama-​like now. Whether they trans­late things like “change” or “yes we can”, or steal the web­site design, this is going to cover the world like Hel­vetica. Could this polit­i­cal party have been more cre­ative? Yes! Can I blame them? No.

Sur­pris­ingly (I don’t like the latin cut) Dax­line Cyril­lic looks nice despite the slated zhe. May be because of the con­struc­tive, arti­fi­cial nature of the cyril­lic let­ters which blend well with the font. Or may be because the cyril­lic is THE LAN­GUAGE for slo­gans.

Ya’ know, as design­ers, it is with extreme rarity, if at all, that we design some­thing that doesn’t stand on the shoul­ders of another con­cept, for­mula, or frame­work. Although, in doing so we must dif­fer­en­ti­ate between bor­row­ing the ideas and con­cepts we’ve seen work and admire - for inspi­ra­tion, and full-​blown rip­ping off of an imple­men­ta­tion from top to bottom.

Obama’s online cam­paign worked for lots of rea­sons, few of which were not already in imple­men­ta­tion else­where, only one of which was the way that it looked, and all of which can be emu­lated with orig­i­nal design and flair. In other words, you could cherry-​pick the nav­i­ga­tion and layout setup, mas­sage it around your needs and design your own site around it. This site, on the other hand, has stolen EVERY­THING about Obama’s site… I know that blue and white are the Israeli flag colors, but the entire color scheme, button style, and layout are copied… and more.

Now we all know that the color scheme and the look of the but­tons isn’t what made this web­site work. It was the acces­si­ble nav­i­ga­tion, use of media, and social nature that made this site shine. And all those things can be imple­mented with­out xerox­ing the design.

Also, other blah blah blah.