What do you do if your version becomes immensely more popular and successful then the thing you copied? When people start calling you a genius.
Stealing Is a Skill
41–50 of 159 posts
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#42"Yes your honor, I copied it pixel-by-pixel."
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#43This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.
Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#44Isn't this essentially what LLMs do?
Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#45The key is stealing from multiple sources. Grab 3+ different sites that you really love and extract the elements that really resonate from each and meld them together into your own synthesis. Copying wholesale and tweaking a couple of things is lame IMO. That being said, pixel-perfect copywork is a fantastic exercise for improving your design skills.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#46Actual stealing is an even more impressive skill. Usually involves intensively trained sleight of hand, elaborate ruses, a very good understanding of theory of mind regarding the victim's attention, and planned deescalation paths in case you're caught.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#47Stealing is indeed a skill... and a sin (target missed) - by experience not good for soul.
Knowing what laws in the countries where your business evolve allow someone to get inspired (as state of the art) or reuse freely from other's work in specific industry is a more valuable skill... and better for soul. One could move smarter and faster with light soul around if rules of the game are known and all opportunities are considered and not missed.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#48I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.
I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/ If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right. https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.
Why did you do this?
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#49I remember working for a somewhat careless manager.. he just pointed at the chrome web dev store and said 'make it look like this'. I could have just copied everything wholesale but I actually handcrafted all the css, borrowing but generally using my own HTML structure, and js. The final result impressed even me. It made me feel.. if I worked on a team with real designers I could create something I would be proud of.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#50I looked up stealing to ground this comment of mine: > stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments…
> fetishize, herbicide and normalize I’m very curious what “herbicide” was an auto-complete for here…
ChatGPT guesses "heroicize".