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Copying is the way design works (2020)

matthewstrom.com

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Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#51

Post by m12k »

karaterobot wrote: post #18

> 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…

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 leverage the expectations and muscle memory they already have. Building on paradigms that others have established as the norm means meeting users where they are.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#52

Post by bongodongobob »

rogerclark wrote: post #49

Carmack 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.

The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology which I believe is what the article is pointing out.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#53

Post by rogerclark »

bongodongobob wrote: post #52
rogerclark wrote: post #49

Carmack 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.

The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology which I believe is what the article is pointing out.

"Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a better version of Mario."

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#54

Post by Terr_ »

hluska wrote: post #38
ppqqrr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists don’t want to make a living. My point is that, too often, the “artists need to make a living too” narrative is used by the system that exploits artists.

Can you rephrase that without a double negative? I don’t have a clue what you’re trying to say and your explanation makes it worse.

Not parent poster, but I suspect the thesis can be rephrased like:

"Artists do want to make a living, however there's a nuance when it comes to achieving that. Finding enough solid supporters requires such a wide dispersal of their content that any 'anti-piracy' measures are almost always counterproductive, at least when it comes to the interests of artists as opposed to middlemen."

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#55

Post by pulse7 »

turnsout wrote: post #43
karmakaze wrote: post #2

This is a great quote: > In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] h…

This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in exchange for $1M worth of pre-IPO Apple stock, which today would be worth [checks notes] more than that. There was no theft. Apple engineers got to see the Alto, not the Star (the screenshot in the article is wrong, the chronology is wrong). The visit was so fast that Apple engineers thought…

Steve Jobs himself told what he saw at Xerox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#56

Post by iczero »

llamaimperative wrote: post #25
breck wrote: post #5

Go further. If you model ideas mathematically, you will see that societies plagued with IPDD ( https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html ) will become extinct, because they prolong the lifespan of bad ideas, and those with intellectual freedom, where bad ideas rapidly evolve into good ideas, will rise to the top of the food chain. The equation is simple: ETA! ( https://breckyunits.com/eta.html ) Question whether we should ev…

Why on earth would IP keep bad ideas around? You're free to make a better idea and let it compete in the market, since by being better it'd definitionally be different.

Let's say someone patents, idk, Client-Side Decoration (CSD). People like it, surely, because people use it. Unfortunately, there is drastically reduced space to innovate because nobody else can use that idea anymore. Expecting the patent holder to innovate has proven to be a bad assumption in part because IPR means they have no competition in that space anyways. The idea stays bad because nobody else can make it better.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#57

Post by ozim »

burningChrome wrote: post #33
karaterobot wrote: post #18

> 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…

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 devs that they think, it must be “framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there for 20 years” - well no if it is crud app most likely it will be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#58

Post by bongodongobob »

rogerclark wrote: post #53
bongodongobob wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology which I believe is what the article is pointing out.

"Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a better version of Mario."

Resolved = tried, wished

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#59

Post by zogrodea »

Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked.

"Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them.

It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."

I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#60

Post by jjcm »

One of the mistakes I made as a young designer was pushing back against trends and fads. My opinion at the time was that trends that weren't thought out from a position of UX principles were an anti-pattern to follow. As I matured more as a designer, I now think nearly the opposite - not following trends is an anti-pattern, since that's what your users will be used to.

Pull down to refresh is a great example of this. Not visible or discoverable at all, but was all the hype when Tweetie first released it. On paper it's an anti-pattern, but now it's so ingrained as a trend and pattern that it became expected, and is now muscle memory for many users.

The same goes with flat buttons - I used to be quite opposed to them since there was no visual elevation off the page designating it as a button. Now if you create a button with a bevel, users will think it's an ad, not part of the page itself.

Copying leads to harmony in the wider ecosystem, and it creates a defined agreement on what things are are how they work. It's an important part of the user experience.

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