I feel like there’s a difference between Virgil Abloh being brought in to work on an iteration of the Air Force 1s and simply ripping off a design from an unrelated company, presumably without permission, and making a few tweaks.
The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-...
Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.
i have a vague memory of hunter s thompson talking about sitting down and typing out the great gatsby to see how it would feel to write a great american novel
Pierre Menards Quixote is not a copy. It is a perfect recreation. While it is word-for-word identical to the original, the whole ironic humor of Borges text is that it is not a copy.
Edit: Which you might know well enough. Just wanted to add some more context.
> When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection.
I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the copied painting.
(Please do not change the cursor, specially the size. There is a reason I changed it.)
I agree. In fact, it's even worse: often times you miss the tradeoffs.
With Software in particular, I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.
If recreating someone else's creation truly learned us, I believe the world would be a tremendously better place.
I used to run a lunch study group where we took some old crusty load bearing software, read the documentation thoroughly, and then dissected it, reading source and comments and trying to distill what it achieved well separate from what it achieved in spite of itself.
My favorite quote that expresses this idea is from Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47: “Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field.”
A good example of why this is true I see in my bubble is in Indie tabletop RPGs. Fairly regularly if you follow indie rpg websites and forums, you get the following "I am sick of how Dungeons and Dragons does X so I made a new system". They will then proceed to describe Dungeons and Dragons but with some half-baked idea that is already done in some other game. So you might say "Hey this is already done in Traveller". But the people who have extremely little exposure to the field, and have only ever played one game (D&D typically) ends up re-exploring the field with "new ideas" that have existed for decades and have already been iterated upon.
there is negative stealing or avoiding mistakes done by others. as propounded by Warren Buffet and others. and epitomized by philosophy of being less wrong.
In a marketplace, this is theft. (Which, given this example is of a website for a for-profit product, seems appropriate.) In a community it's tradition. Building on traditions in a community (aka great artists steal) is different than trying to get yours in a marketplace. Art and community traditions aren't a competition until they are dragged into the marketplace.
This isn't stealing in the "good artists copy, great artists steal" sense. This is just straight copying/plagiarism.
To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."
I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.
It was fun, and I like a challenge. I enjoy Lisp, and I retracing pg’s steps was gratifying.
Today most things are complex, and they don’t last very long. I wanted to pick apart something that’s lasted since the birth of the internet. Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.
No, it’s not. I used LLMs. It was still hard as fuck, and LLMs can’t actually help you when you’re trying to reproduce someone’s graphical design (specifically the pg buttons).
If you think it’s easy, or even possible without investing months, I invite you to try.
Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together.
As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?
The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.
The sorites paradox says that removing a grain of sand from a heap doesn't stop it from being a heap, and yet we can do that until we are left with a single grain of sand which is clearly not a heap.
Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.
Clearly the act of combining various elements into a coherent whole is the added value here. Like musicians which take various samples and sounds and combine them into something novel and harmonic
I remember working for a somewhat careless manager.. he just pointed at the chrome web dev store and said 'make it look like this'. I could have just copied everything wholesale but I actually handcrafted all the css, borrowing but generally using my own HTML structure, and js. The final result impressed even me. It made me feel.. if I worked on a team with real designers I could create something I would be proud of.
Stealing is a source of flattery. I've had logos I've designed outright copied. Jokes on them: They discovered they could not copyright the mark and had to rebrand (again).
Stealing is stealing unless you're really good at it.
> However, it’s your job to go down the rabbit hole, learn the 100%, and sprinkle in your 3%.
I would say that there is a big difference between stealing without acknowledgement, and stealing with acknowledgement and actively learning through reverse engineering.
Very, and really very few things, especially in software engineering is novel or new. Everything is the same old concepts, repackaged, tweaked, renamed. Cyclical in nature, fads come and go.
The key is stealing from multiple sources. Grab 3+ different sites that you really love and extract the elements that really resonate from each and meld them together into your own synthesis. Copying wholesale and tweaking a couple of things is lame IMO. That being said, pixel-perfect copywork is a fantastic exercise for improving your design skills.
Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.
When people finally offload 100% of their brain and forget how to use their creative reasoning abilities my guess is we’ll just all use Tailwind defaults across the board. No need to try new things, nobody will experiment because it’s so easy not to!
(Joking, mostly) but we did see this with Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc. the masses converge on simple web experiences because it’s pretty easy to get something that “just works”.
Stealing is indeed a skill... and a sin (target missed) - by experience not good for soul.
Knowing what laws in the countries where your business evolve allow someone to get inspired (as state of the art) or reuse freely from other's work in specific industry is a more valuable skill... and better for soul. One could move smarter and faster with light soul around if rules of the game are known and all opportunities are considered and not missed.
while the article may be making the process sound more meaningful than it actually is, I think there's a definite benefit to learning by trying to copy others, then making tweaks as you go. Honestly, it can be quite interesting to code your own version of a tool you plan to use, then compare the code to the original to see how you both handled things differently. Or to just look at a random website/app/footage of the same and try to figure out how everything works there.
Actual stealing is an even more impressive skill. Usually involves intensively trained sleight of hand, elaborate ruses, a very good understanding of theory of mind regarding the victim's attention, and planned deescalation paths in case you're caught.
“Stealing is a skill” is catchy but doesn’t express the underlying concept as well as your other principles. I would suggest “learn by copying good things”, or “quality work is where you find it” or something to that effect.
If you're being a great artist who steals you may perfectly reproduce something, but in such a different and novel context that it feels fresh, or taking something verbatim and then modifying it with your work, vs say taking an series of ideas from a work and then not really changing or moving from what they were originally expressing
An example of this is from Offworld Trading Company[0], which literally started by copying the market from Age of Empires[1] and then iterated on it as well as the auction mechanics from MULE[2], I vaguely recall them talking about this in their GDC talk[3], though I could be misremembering that(it's a good talk though)
I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if anyone who was stolen from in those cases feels hurt by it
Compare that to stealing, where the parties stolen from were really quite angry at what was stolen, Triple Town vs Yeti Town[4], which very much looked like a lazy clone
I think copying a website like this is very poor taste regardless. If I see you doing this, I immediately lose trust in your product and will immediately leave.
If you can't put the effort into the face of your product, how can I trust you to put effort into the product itself? Shitty behavior, with a shitty justification self-affirmation blogpost.
I think the author's choice of words is framing the discussion. They did build their own website, but they loved the look of the one they saw, so I'd think a better choice would be "inspired by" rather than "stolen from."
Technically, everything is stealing and everyone is stealing others work, you might use an open source software, might build your own but uses someone else’s libraries, might take someone’s UI design like OP, someone might use someone’s components, dig deeper and someone is using the icons to build components, dig deeper and someone’s is using a software with builtin tools trained to make similar icons to others, really, there’s no bottom to it. And if you decide to reinvent the whole wheel from the little details, you definitely will have so many bugs and issues, and most likely no one will likes it because it’s fundamentally different than how they are used to use XYZ.
Yeah, this is kinda crazy. This isn't stealing some ideas, their website is a printscreen of the original with some colors shifted. I doubt this is even legal.
There is something of a tradition in the design world to use theft-shaped words for things we collect for inspiration/ideas. A piece of advice I followed in the 80s and 90s when paper was still a thing was to have a "Swipe File," which was a collection of things you saw and liked, on paper.
In my own case as a designer of desktop apps, my Swipe File was not just digital screen shots of parts of apps that I admired, but I physically printed them out as well so I could spread them on a desk, floor, and walls when brainstorming.
That word "Swipe" also inspired the name of a design store catering to creative professionals in my home town, Toronto:
This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.
Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.
I looked up stealing to ground this comment of mine:
> stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments about copying someones digital creation doesn't really mean you took what they had from them, you just made a copy, though this doesn't logically apply to if I also physically stole someones product and made a copy since copyright/patent protection likely applies)
the very point is that theft means you no longer have something since someone else has. copying is you still have it and someone else now too. there is no harm done by copying, except you actually believe that exclusivity as a separate concept is important to you. (debatable, I don't).