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Copying is the way design works (2020)
111–120 of 245 posts
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#112Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines. We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses. Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives.…
It goes deeper than that. We are copies of our parents made out of self replicating molecules… copying is fundamental to pretty much everything interesting that has ever happened.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#113Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior. Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.
Disagree. Commander Keen 4-6 are better than Mario, imo.
To add to this Commander Keen was released on a very limited platform. More people were gaming on Nintendo systems than personal computers. If Commander Keen was released on Nintendo things may have gone differently.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#114> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too. I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist inste…
Even an artist as to meet something that can resonate within its public to be called thus, otherwise the person might be creative but lake the social dimension which is a preponderant trait of any artistic practice. Much like the difference between creating a language of your own for exclusive usage in your diary and creating a language enshrined in some literature work like Tolkien did.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs don't have experience though. They might not have had experience 2 years ago, but in the meantime they assisted 100s of millions of people for many billion tasks. Many of them are experiences you can't find in a book. They contain on-topic feedback and even real world outcomes to LLM ideas. Deployed LLMs create experiences, they get exposed to things outside their training distribution, they search solution sp…
This sounds like an ad. What is "assisted 100s of millions of people in many billions of tasks"? Any real world data? If it's generating new random clip art for presentations, sure. If it's making new flavor text based on generic input, sure. If my question is "what is the circumference of earth", and I run a model with a temperature of 100, will it give me a good result? Will it always give me a good result with a t…
> You might think it's clever because it's generated code for you, but that's probably because you asked it to make something 500 people already made and published on GitHub.
An LLM has no problem coming up with novel solutions within my own esoteric physics framework that only exist on my computer, using my patterns and taking all the nuances into account. It's definitely not just spitting out something it has seen before.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#116Even more strongly; Copying is the way we Learn.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy. The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some inc…
Do you have any examples of some "cool" sites that you designed, even prototypes? You piqued my interest.
When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect.
It was very similar to this site where you had jarring transitions, background changes and images moving at different speeds. https://doubble.group/sg/
The end result was very similar to site above and we all got a lot of positive feedback when their current clients saw it because they were blown away. While I was busy separating my shoulder patting myself on the back - we realized a few months in, the engagement was horrendous. The leads from their contact form dried up to almost nothing. Analytics showed an insane drop off from the home page. None of the internal pages were getting any traffic. We quickly realized that nobody could find any content on the site, they couldn't get to the contact page very easily, the content was hard to find and or read because of the motion and animation that constantly took your focus off of what you, as a user, were trying to do.
We had up for four months before having to pull it and put up their old site, then re-design another simple, more refined site that would work better for their users. It was a great lesson to learn about solving problems or trying to create something cool that nobody could use.
We also designed a site for a local event to support a women's shelter and used parallax again to tell a story of how women are shuffled through a system that does little to protect them from their ex-husbands or violent abusers.
It used the same techniques in this, where you had both horizontal and vertical scrolling in both directions to show a timeline and story with illustrations and infographics. https://collagestudio.ca/en
This also got a ton of good feedback and we had a few other non-profits approach us to do something similar for them and we did a few more using the same template we had, but switching some elements to make it original for each client. This worked out much better because if people were able to digest the story and the points you were trying to make, it had a better impact than new clients trying to find specific content and the contact page.
Hope that helps!
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#118Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#119> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too. I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist inste…
This. I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy. The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some inc…
> The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them.
hmmm... That approach is anathema to every other UI designer or UX person I encountered in that field. The core of UI design is 100% about clarity-- letting the user focus on exactly what they need to solve their problem. The core guiding principle of UX work is designing based on empirical research, and then iterating based on user testing... even if it doesn't work out like that in practice, it's still laser-focused on helping the user achieve what they need.
Did you transfer into the field from a non-web-design background? The people I've seen approach web design with the intent of making some sexy website that's flashy for its own sake were a) front-end developers that thought the technical know-how was the hard part, b) branding and identity designers, or maybe print designers that never had to consider designs that people actually had to do stuff with, and c) small-org IT people that were sick of IT and were charged with maintaining the organization's website so they figured it would be an easy switch.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it real consideration that anyone could consider to be worth "all the IP that you happen to be able to see while on this tour", or is it real consideration that Xerox thought was worth "an opportunity to see how we run the best tech lab of our generation"? Don't forget that Apple presumably got paid $1M dollars out of the deal in addition to the tour. I'm having a hard time seeing the argument that the right to pa…
I don't care; as far as I'm concerned, that argument is isomorphic to "would $1MM literal dollars be enough for what they saw, or should the number be higher". Maybe. But the right to buy shares is not really a meaningful distinction to the simple issuance of shares in this historical context. That's all I'm arguing.
in retrospect? sure. at the time? radically different.
just ask your average sv startup employee if they think options and RSUs are the same