Copyright Advisory Network

Hello everyone. This is my first post so forgive me if a similar question has already been asked.

I work for a professional photo lab. One of our services to our photographers is to create various templates that are displayed through an ordering software and applied to their images before printing.

For our sports photographers, we offer many different designs such as baseball trader cards, graphic prints, etc.

One of those types of graphic prints we offer is magazine covers. Our templates are always completely designed by us. My question is: Is it illegal to base a magazine cover template off of a popular magazine design?

For example, we would like to emulate the design of Sports Illustrated, but call it Baseball Illustrated. The design aesthetic would LOOK LIKE Sports Illustrated in font choice, etc. Another option we want to use is BQ: Baseball Quarterly, and make the design style look as close to GQ as possible.

We never use actual magazine cover names, just change them up to coincide with our sports theme, but The templates themselves are never sold to our clients, they are only online. We just sell the final prints to them, which are then sold to their clients.

A perfect example of what we are doing with our templates is what SHOWTIME did with their ad campaign for the previous season of Dexter:

http://thetvaddict.com/2008/08/28/exclu … cover-boy/

So, is this legal?