Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
Plagiarists also steal.
Stealing Is a Skill
61–70 of 159 posts
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#62The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-...
Really love the "eye-grabbing top fold"
::looks at bootstrap hero styling::
Oh, right.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#63The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-...
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#64Person learns the idea that being unethical pays of sometimes. And therefore, ethics don't matter.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#65> When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection.
I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the copied painting.
(Please do not change the cursor, specially the size. There is a reason I changed it.)
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#66Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work. If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work. It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters. This seems like the web design version of this.
This was my first thought as well. Hunter S. Thompson used to copy Hemingway by hand to internalize his cadence.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#67I think copying a website like this is very poor taste regardless. If I see you doing this, I immediately lose trust in your product and will immediately leave. If you can't put the effort into the face of your product, how can I trust you to put effort into the product itself? Shitty behavior, with a shitty justification self-affirmation blogpost.
I think the author's choice of words is framing the discussion. They did build their own website, but they loved the look of the one they saw, so I'd think a better choice would be "inspired by" rather than "stolen from."
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#68My favorite quote that expresses this idea is from Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47: “Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field.”
there is negative stealing or avoiding mistakes done by others. as propounded by Warren Buffet and others. and epitomized by philosophy of being less wrong.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#69> When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection. I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the cop…
I agree. In fact, it's even worse: often times you miss the tradeoffs.
With Software in particular, I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.
If recreating someone else's creation truly learned us, I believe the world would be a tremendously better place.
I used to run a lunch study group where we took some old crusty load bearing software, read the documentation thoroughly, and then dissected it, reading source and comments and trying to distill what it achieved well separate from what it achieved in spite of itself.
We learned a lot.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#70while the article may be making the process sound more meaningful than it actually is, I think there's a definite benefit to learning by trying to copy others, then making tweaks as you go. Honestly, it can be quite interesting to code your own version of a tool you plan to use, then compare the code to the original to see how you both handled things differently. Or to just look at a random website/app/footage of the same and try to figure out how everything works there.