71–80 of 245 posts
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 author got lost in his argumentation. He starts with design, but goes off into the lands of open source, patents, and art. It's not a well-written or researched article. Design is not software development is not art.
> 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…
Originality certainly has a role to play in there - many (most?) iconic products were strikingly original. Would the iPod have been a better designed product with a D-pad (or other standard button arrangement) over its scrollwheel? Or the Wii with a standard gamepad?
Originality and novelty (particularly when it comes to visual aesthetics) are forces people respond to, and great designers know how to channel those forces in constructive ways for their work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> There was no theft. I didn't know that touring somewhere meant you could copy all their designs. Was that explicitly stated?
> "Functionally and aesthetically, the chairs are identical." Listen dude, go ahead and buy the $145 Modway chair. It's so bad, it is $118 nowadays. It will literally fall apart under your ass. Read the reviews.
Followed by pictures of two different-looking chairs. IMO the Modway looks notably worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was no theft. I didn't know that touring somewhere meant you could copy all their designs. Was that explicitly stated?
Why would they give away 1m in stock just to look?
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…
There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make i…
Tom Ford commented on the issue of counterfeit and "knock off" products in the fashion industry, he said after some research (I assume by him/his company) they found that the people buying the cheap counterfeit products weren't their customers anyway, and so they weren't losing anything.