One of the themes with our questionnaire, and generally in our lives as designers for all of us working on the magazine, is the detestable practice of plagiarism in the design community. We got a lot of varied responses to one of our questions about the industry view of imitation vs inspiration, and how it’s perceived/handled outside of the academic environment.
To me the majority were like “yeah, it sucks, but you can’t really do anything about it”
I guess that’s how I saw it playing out in school as well. Some of the most ardent style-chasers and idea-copiers had their transgressions ignored, in the face of the overwhelming evidence and transparency of what was being done.
As some who always tries to do something differently I found it frustrating when people who were just mimicking better designers were able to get the same attention, critiquing seriousness, and often better grades. I guess my frustration lies in the fact that the thoughts I was always running into were the same:
“Is no one going to say anything about this!” “Am I the only one that can see that’s a complete Rand knockoff!?” “I mentioned my idea and 10 minutes later you just HAPPEN to change what you’re doing!?” “The teacher has to notice, they’ll say something, point them towards something else right? NO!? What is going on!” “She clearly stole that idea!” “Her boyfriend made that., why is that okay!?” “If this is how its going to be, maybe I should just drop out and try to be a zoologist like I wanted to be in 4th grade.”
Oh, sorry, maybe I’m still a little bitter about things.
Anyway, what I was getting at, was the idea that certain things like plagiarism, unoriginality, or the idea of just telling someone when a project isn’t working, or someones already done it, always seemed to be the ignored elephant in the room. At least in my interactions with Professors, they always just assumed the person had done it unintentionally, mistaking imitation for accidentally overly-similar inspiration.
I came across an interesting article relating to this however, the idea of “stealing” not just imitating.
I disagree with some of whats being said, but in general, the idea of “stealing” bits and pieces of things, learning how they all work together, so in the end, you have a better understanding of WHY certain things work, and WHY elements belong together, and then how to break those rules, is ideal.
For me it relates easier to web design. Like taking bits of CSS code, javascript from here and there, so you can understand the structure a bit better as everything goes together. But trying to just take a whole page’s code at once, then being confused why the DIVs aren’t fitting right, is the “imitation” aspect of it. There is also “stealing” in the sense of taking certain chunks of data, such as CSS hacks to make things work in IE, or taking code to help comply with web standards, that I don’t have a problem with. This however isn’t that “creative”, and so isn’t where my problem is with regards to design plagiarism.
Relating this ‘theft’ idea to general design becomes problematic. Some things can be taken apart to better understand how things go together. For instance certain elements of design are iconic, sometimes necessary to get an idea across. Certain rules of design, such as grid systems, letter spacing, ligatures are all important parts of design. Following these rules, guidelines are part of “stealing” design. People look at Josef Muller-Brockmann’s grids and can learn, copy and use them. The same applies to those “Best Of” series of books that Rockport puts out all the time. Those generally are used as a starting point for different elements of design, like “oh, rounded corners on business cards could look nice” or “that fold style could work well on my brochure design too”. At least, that’s the hope right? But there is a boundary line with these moments of “stealing” that’s harder to define than web development examples.
In design the boundary between stealing and imitation is much more vague. Within that boundary is the idea of “inspiration”. This idea, though hard to distinguish, is the ideal that some like to think they can be held to. The idea that I wasn’t copying this person’s design completely, I may have stolen a few elements, but in general I was simply inspired by what I saw and expanded upon it.
Lets just try and define these terms then, so that its clear, at least to us here, what we should strive to be doing to avoid plagiarism. Also, lets do some random music metaphors to help the analogy.
The Music Theory Major: Stealing is the idea of taking individual elements of a design and applying them to your own products. Stealing is a way to use established pieces of a whole towards another goal, thus helping you to learn about the base element, while expanding upon it in a completely different direction. Stealing is ok. You are learning your instrument, and you’re about to write some great music.
The “I grew up listening to ___” Band: Inspiration is the idea of seeing another design and having an epiphany towards your own design. This can include stealing, such as certain elements, but in the end its a completely different idea, expanding upon the original in such a way that they cannot be quickly connected. Inspiration is ok. All that practice paid off. You listened to Revolver 500 times, but you sound nothing like the Beatles.
The Karaoke Cover Band: Imitation is the idea of seeing another design and having an epiphany towards you own. This includes stealing to a point that you’ve plagiarized the majority of a piece and the elements of both are clearly connected. Nothing was learned. Nothing was taken to another level. And nothing was actually designed, simply reproduced. Imitation is not ok. You think playing guitar hero counts for something.
Now of course this isn’t including the groundbreakers, the trend setters, the people that others look towards and who influence the rest of us. And it doesn’t include the people who will do anything BUT what they see being done by others. But this is a good start on categorizing the problem, I think.
Would love to hear some feedback on this.
Fill/Stroke is a visual and semantic exploration of design. Fill/Stroke is both a publication (coming soon) as well as a growing community of people who share similar interests and a desire to discuss and share with each other. We are based in Phoenix, Arizona.
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[...] This situation really chapped my ass (I love that saying)! Around this time, I also read this great post by Mark Dudlik, a Twitter buddy, about the difference between stealing and imitating in the design [...]
1. Not Taking Initiative the&hellip. 4 January 2009.
nice read here :)
but i dont think you should be so disappointed about this, if every “designer” would do something that noone has ever done befor it would be so much harder to comeup with a fresh idea.
and if your idea is really that good noone will take the copycats seriously, like the aqua effect, if i see it i only think of apple. this makes the original owner even more famous. sorry for my english :D
2. antpaw. 6 January 2009.
This is the trouble with living in the digital age. As great as it is to be able to send something instantly to someone else, we also have to deal with the ease of copying. But you benefit from the openness, so it’s not necessarily the best idea to close thigns off (hiding html css code)
You could look across cultures at design from the past and see where an artists’s work simply couldn’t be recreated easily because the work was so skillfully done, duplication too difficult for most. Those paintings can be mass produced posters now, more people can see the imagery. We benefit a lot from living in these times. Products created faster, information faster, learning easier.
When you think of this topic It’s all about what people consider “bad” in their hearts for themselves. If they’re personal rewards are higher for an original work which required a certain amount of learning they wanted to do, they will follow that path. Some just want money. And when they have money, they don’t care about what they did to get it. Designers are not the worst category of industrialist for this behavior.
With cover bands, you have to remember that some people just love playing music, love the crowds and are creating a show based on what people can’t see from the original. Led Zeppelin isn’t touring, but a cover band can be a good alternative. And that band loves playing their favorites for themselves and for you. And they should earn the money doing that at a venue. People like to see how good cover bands do.
Architecture in many different centuries was copied and it was part of that period of time and region. I think if you keep growing and changing your own design, you’ll always be a step ahead. The present moment in many ways is all that counts anyway. Dwell on the copiers and the leeches and how far into that state of mind do you let yourself go. Far enough to distract you from your own goals?
So many industries and craftsmen have had to deal with technology making their work easier. Continue to take advantage of what the technology gives you. You know that you try to copy yourself after you do something good. Reuse that framework, those stylesheets, those flash slideshows. So you can move just as fast as copiers can. They aren’t making you worse.
And I think it’s good for the masses too that copiers are out there. Because people in business tend to extract as much as they can from an invention. When copies are out there, they learn they can’t just not compete and sit on their invention forever getting royalties. It sucks, but the more you want to regulate, litigate stall the process, the more time you spend on that and not creating. Probably the less you are creating, the slower technolgy progresses by whatever increment you were contributing.
I just read this quote on Digg or Metafilter or something and I thought it was very interesting, I kind of appreciate it more than maybe I would have a couple years ago. The concept was all about authenticity.That’s the question. What makes something authentic?
http://log.scifihifi.com/post/68006873/nothing-is-original-steal-from-anywhere-that
3. smick. 17 January 2009.
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