As a designer, one eventually thinks not about what they liked in other people's work but why it worked. You can derive a design out a compendium of some things that you've seen that you like, but ultimately, to be successful you need to know why what you're copying made sense for its purpose. Perhaps you need to even encounter the same problem; it takes a bit of maturity to copy effectively.
Copying is the way design works (2020)
131–140 of 245 posts
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#132Good artists copy, great artists steal
- Pablo Picasso
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to be edgy or whatever… most of people pay for having cookie cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good experience and they don’t want to be surprised on EDM event - well there are big names that can do whatever they want of course but that is different expectation. The same with software…
Wow, this couldn't be further from the truth. It might be true for DJs playing "main stage" style EDM (poppy mainstream music) but for most electronic subgenres – especially techno – the crowd absolutely expects the DJ to be a superb crate digger and pull out new and deep tracks they've never heard before. No one goes to a techno club to hear rinsed tracks; they want the DJ to show them music they've never heard befo…
It's like the perfect conterexample, a good DJ needs to have really good taste and constantly listen to new tracks and think about where they can be used.
Designers everyone thinks are more creative than they are. DJs most people think are less creative than they need to be.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#134As a former designer with a broad background (graphics, typography, print, web, product design) whenever I read something like this I get the feeling people generally have a misguided idea of what design is.
Many (bad) designers confuse what I would call styling with design. Design is a lot about functionality and how information is organized visually. These two core design points can only be copied if the underlying project is exactly the same in terms of underlying information. But even for two blogs about different topics the question which information needs to be presented how would be different — even if both blogs were using the browser's default CSS. This is the core of design.
Styling is finding colors, shapes proportions etc. All of this of course overlaps with the functional question and the question of organization of information — bigger buttons get more attention and all that — but ultimately you can slap more or less any style on any content. Whether it makes sense is a different question.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#135Steve Jobs didn’t just waltz into Xerox PARC and steal a glimpse at the Alto. That visit was heavily lawyered and PARC got Apple shares as compensation. To summarize this as “stealing” is just incorrect. Lazy work.
Except Apple recruited GUI engineers from PARC to work on the Lisa and Macintosh itself. I don't think you can steal any better than that.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 aw…
>When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect.
A friend of mine designed such a site with his web design company. I instantly thought, amazing but horrendous.
On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#137> 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…
> If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. Copying is the way art works as well (at least for those who are not doing super-edgy-fine-art). Typical journey of a digital painter: 1. Refuse to copy. Refuse to even look at references. 2. Hoard references. Over reference. 3. Copy in the right way.
Music isn't very different either. A common recommendation is to first learn to play songs you like, and then to start diverging a bit and to adjust the things you don't like and merge the ideas you like later on.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#138> 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…
There's a full time design team where I work. The menu items got decided before they all got hired.
What they do is to move them around every few months, change the colours, design our application with a mobile layout, despite 99% of our users being on desktop computers…
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#139> 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…
There's a full time design team where I work. The menu items got decided before they all got hired. What they do is to move them around every few months, change the colours, design our application with a mobile layout, despite 99% of our users being on desktop computers…
they need to be punched in the face!
Designers that change up the UI just to have something to do drive me nuts! And, now it's life threatening because cars now get updates every ~12 months where some designers have decided how to use the car changes. So, things you got used to suddenly change and you have to figure them out WHILE YOU'RE DRIVING!
I hope someone manages to sue over these changes when someone inevitably dies, so they'll be some pressure not to make them.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours. So to the extent that originality means diverging from those expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing your users a disservice, by not letting them lever…
Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."
Applies to other things like music too. Sometimes people are ahead of their time and most people can't digest it.