81–90 of 159 posts
I feel like there’s a difference between Virgil Abloh being brought in to work on an iteration of the Air Force 1s and simply ripping off a design from an unrelated company, presumably without permission, and making a few tweaks.
My 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.”
And then, if you are great, you will steal not from one thing but from everything
I 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.
There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.
I've gone through my own cycle of this as a musician. Early in my music experience I was always obsessed with originality, and wouldn't learn a lot of existing pieces. At the stage I'm at now, I find great value in learning great songs and understanding why they work. There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things t…
Copywork 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.
A bit tough to say this, but transformers are trained the same way.
In any case, why is it "a bit tough to say this"? You thought your ability to learn was irreproducible?
> 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…
The very definition of "cargo cult" in a software context.
I feel like there’s a difference between Virgil Abloh being brought in to work on an iteration of the Air Force 1s and simply ripping off a design from an unrelated company, presumably without permission, and making a few tweaks.
Isn't it also well-documented that Virgil Abloh stole more in the ~100% range from up-and-coming designers who then saw nothing for their work?