Great Artists (Designers) Steal
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The document discusses the complexities of borrowing in design, including the historical context, the definition of terms, and the debate between originality and common practices. It addresses the ethical aspects of 'theft' in artistic creation, advocating for the responsible use of inspiration and emphasizing the importance of collaboration and innovation. Ultimately, it posits that stealing ideas can enhance design outcomes, provided it is done ethically and with proper acknowledgment.
![Where to steal from
- “if you’re designing for the web, why look at loads
of design portals that show loads of web sites that
essentially all look the same? […] Surely they offer
too narrow a view to be really inspirational.”
Brendon Dawes, Analog In, Digital Out](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/atopresentation-greatartistssteal-141114100759-conversion-gate01/85/Great-Artists-Designers-Steal-36-320.jpg)
Great Artists (Designers) Steal
- 5. 1. Framing 2. Why Artists Steal 3. Welcome to the Family
- 6. Goals: 1. Better Understand Design 2. Encourage active collaboration 3. Further discussion on standards in structured borrowing
- 8. Context a.Historical Context b.Definition of terms c.Comparing communal standards d.Role of an Artist
- 11. Jobs vs. Gates • Influence pervades • “Fair Game” has many meanings
- 16. Problem: While development can be deemed open and thus benefit from a diverse community of contributors, design has always inherently been open in nature.
- 17. Questions: 1. Is borrowing permissable? 2. How can we borrow, but still innovate? 3. What should our attitude be toward those who borrow from us? 4. When does borrowing become theft?
- 18. Design verses Development Development - Needs collaboration - Values efficiency - Behind the scenes: self-value ethic Design - Seeks independence - Values originality - Center stage: judged by all
- 19. Designer Responsibility • Continuation of storytelling legacy • Derive elegant solutions to real problems
- 20. Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution. Ivan Chermayeff
- 21. To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master. Milton Glaser
- 22. Artist’s Tools - Perspective - Awareness - Empathy
- 23. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change. Joseph Campbell The Hero With a Thousand Faces
- 25. Why Artists Steal a.UX Benefits b.Efficiency and expediency c.Setting the bar
- 26. Why do artists steal - Familarity - Memory Mapping - Conventionality - Cameron Moll on foundations - Efficiency - Artists as curators
- 27. Benefits of Familiarity • Two systems of decision making • Concious vs. Unconcious • Our culture functions primarily on instant impressions Daniel Kahneman Nobel Prize-winning researcher • Design decisions fail when they do not leverage their predecessors Dr. A.K. Pradeep, study of GAP failed logo launch
- 28. “Designers are often reluctant to take advantage of them (conventions). Faced with the prospect of using a convention, there’s a great temptation for designers to reinvent the wheel instead, largely because they feel (not incorrectly) that they’ve been hired to do something new and different, and not the same old thing. (Not to mention the fact that praise from peers, awards, and high-profile job offers are rarely based on criteria like “best use of conventions.)” Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think!
- 29. There are more than a billion pages on the web - for your inspiration Seth Godin
- 30. Great Design Ships • We are not always the gatekeepers • Stand on the shoulders of giants Nina Paley Iterations on accepted and familiar patterns have a better chance of making it to market and of being accepted
- 32. Types of theft • Not all theft is conscious • Theft differs from appropriation, iteration, and improvement • Fork designs, push changes back to help others
- 33. Ethical Theft - Steal inspiration instead of outcome - Reverse engineer final products - Always cite, Always give back - Make designs available to others, give credit
- 34. One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. TS Elliot
- 35. Goals and Best Practices - Curate intentionally - Work within community - Continue to innovate - Great design sets the bar higher - Look outside your comfort zone
- 36. Where to steal from - “if you’re designing for the web, why look at loads of design portals that show loads of web sites that essentially all look the same? […] Surely they offer too narrow a view to be really inspirational.” Brendon Dawes, Analog In, Digital Out
- 37. Protection from Theft - Notriety protects from plagiarism - Edison and the patent clerks - Use tools, know your rights - Read copyright laws http://www.sitepoint.com/the-web-designers-copyright-crash-course/ - Always have a contract - Document everything
- 38. Summation: - Theft Happens: - It’s at times involuntary - It comes in many varities - It’s part of designing - Steal Better - Follow ethics, follow laws, copy inspiration - Stealing is good - Stolen products often work better
Editor's Notes
- #2: AG: My childhood masterpieces were rendered on tracing paper My imitation was made obvious by my iteration - Years later.. I saw a documentary on Disney animators flipping tracing paper
- #3: This isn’t a mandate - it’s a confession -Let us become aware of it, and intentional in it - Apply standards - Understand it more fully
- #4: Film: homage writer: research is fundamental
- #5: The development community needs to set the tone Openness makes creation and problem solving easier Stealing is good Steal is going to happen, even if it isn’t good
- #6: Expectations for presentation - open ended question
- #8: UWG - Browsers - TinyMCE - Wordpress - GitLabs and github repos - Google Applications - Drive Moving on to context in design community
- #9: Expectations for presentation - open ended question
- #10: Current Event: Apple’s Jony Ivy has accused Chinese phone manufacturer of stealing Apple designs. http://readwrite.com/2014/10/13/jony-ive-apple-copying-stealing-vanity-fair
- #11: -Patent wars are becoming ridiculous - like the “zero-length” swip == click argument - Apple has a history of borrowing/copying - Many Apple features in i0S8 are ported from Android This extends Ivy’s mentors clash over “theft”
- #12: Jobs v Gates story Design does not exist in a vacuum. We’re all influenced by each other.
- #13: -Apple’s stuff has been seen elsewhere - HTC, Samsung - Their software seems ported from Android It’s important to classify design as a language - a communicative currency If language were a currency - and royalties were due- Drake would be rich Or maybe, the true incepter http://www.businessinsider.com/xiaomi-to-jony-ive-try-our-phones-before-you-accuse-us-of-theft-2014-10
- #14: Carpe Diem I borrow Colin Quinn’s analysis At what point does the derivation of an element no longer owe its existence to the creator of its parent element? Ivy, Jobs, Gates, Lin Bin - all clashing over their genius, we should look to true genius
- #15: Jobs - guilt over putting stuff together This is key - we are curators, using our perspective to create
- #16: Old Steve vs. Young Steve Steve Jobs famously said great Artists steal. The GUI was lifted from Xerox, but when Google released Android, Jobs called it a stolen product and promised to go thermonuclear war on it. What changed? The developmental methods were completely different - languages, tools, teams, objectives - and even the dogma of the OS was entirely different - “Welcome to the walled Garden” vs. “Hey here’s our kernel, go HAM” (picture of dog exposing belly) Design was what offended Steve as having been stolen - the way the product works. It was his genius - his intuition for how people interacted with objects, data, and interfaces. He attempted to have doctors redesign his breathing apparatus. It was who he was. So he felt that, in lifting the HOW of the design, Google had taken part of himself they were not entitled to take. Design though is inherently imbued with parts of ourselves - so it takes a reinvention of our interpretation of self to say, anything created with help from my creation is also imbued with part of my identity, and is therefore part of my design lineage.
- #19: Development becomes this inherently open process where collaboration is required - and the tools common to the development community are often shared, as are best practices, trends, and helpful tips (shot of snarky stack overflow conversation) But in design, things aren’t always so open. Probably the most high-profile piece of proprietary software commonly used by any of your teams is being used by your designer. That’s not to say there doesn’t exist community - but that’s exactly the point - it springs up in spite of trends.
- #20: We are modern mechanics, artisans, engineers, and painters, writers, poets, and filmmakers. We present stories, characters, and information fluidly, in a variety of contexts, suitable for digestion across myriad platforms. It’s important we see ourselves as the continuation of a proud tradition of expression and storytelling. The story does not lay flat on page, page comes alive, story surrounds, and audience IS a character, many times, the antagonist, prompting change through interaction, whether fluidic or fraught with struggle. As such we should understand the historical context of our skills and objectives - every major communicative medium endures the growth pains the web now faces, and navigates them in their own manner.
- #23: As Artists, We are Thieves Artist reflect, interpret, modify the world around us. We can only do this through our lens, our perspective, with our toolset. Once we’ve rendered something, it is forever imbued with our perspective. So if our collective perspective is lacking, we cannot accurately see the world, let alone reflect it, and answer its needs. It is important for us to steal - or borrow - the perspective and pangs of others to better answer questions we have not thought to ask, and solve problems we have not ourselves even struggled with. This requires we remain tuned into those around us, and that we translate ourselves into walking surveys, walking sociological and psychological studies on the mechanics of our interfaces, information ,and craft - to better improve, iterate, and invent.
- #26: Expectations for presentation - open ended question
- #27: A positive side-effect to copying is conventionality - similar foundations - layout and IA and therefore it becomes “intuitive” to use a product and familiar, comfortable, appealing. We often don’t have time to painstakingly create anew. This isn’t an excuse, but its a consideration. Steal from yourself - in iterating, you will create things you’ll never use, so revisit them! (See bottom: resources to steal from) Picasso meant great artists are great curators - great collectors of otherwise hidden sources. It wouldn’t do them any good to steal well known material - but to bring lesser known designs to the masses helps them become a trend and appeal to more people - works them into the collective lexicon, the design language of all people - and achieve maximum impact. Nokia had an example of the iPhone 15 years ago but never did anything with it. Great designs, if kept private, do not achieve the fundamental goal of great design: to empower, influence, enhance, and enrapture its audience.
- #28: Development becomes this inherently open process where collaboration is required - and the tools common to the development community are often shared, as are best practices, trends, and helpful tips (shot of snarky stack overflow conversation) But in design, things aren’t always so open. Probably the most high-profile piece of proprietary software commonly used by any of your teams is being used by your designer. That’s not to say there doesn’t exist community - but that’s exactly the point - it springs up in spite of trends.
- #30: The best solution is probably already out there - the question is how to find it, and how to make sure its the best. This is because many designs arise to solve similar problems. Ask yourself why you’re embarking on a certain path!
- #31: A lot of times, designers are not the gatekeepers - so standing on the shoulders of giants and iterating is the best way to get something into the market - it mitigates the risk for art directors and project managers and assures them it will work, it will deliver, it will achieve its end. This also highlights one of the great things about being stolen from - maybe your gatekeeper held something back, but this process can be subverted by openly sharing design and ideas, content can still make it to market through alternative channels. Impro by Keight Johnstone argues when improvisers strive for originality they fail. Instead, be obvious - specifics become and seem universal, and what’s obvious to you isn’t obvious to anyone else - so even if you and ten other designers steal from the same piece, you won’t steal the same things.
- #33: Not all Stealing is Conscious We are stewards and curators of design trends and techniques, and so quickly become repositories for new methods. We don’t always mean to steal, sometimes we think we’ve invented something when really we’ve seen it somewhere else before, or we’ve merely appropriated something common. Even when we do iterate in cases such as this we must recognize we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Rather than shying away from comparison, or seeking to undo this subconscious borrowing, we should go down the rabbit hole, seeking to understand why things work, why we want to steal them in the first place - so we can transplant similar rationale to our other solutions and discoveries.
- #34: Copy the inspiration - not the outcome Sort of like wikipedia - look to the footnotes, seek to understand why something works, or where it came from in order to work from a common ancestor - don’t copy the outcome verbatim, that’s in bad taste, and also doesn’t achieve what design is meant to in that it does not set your product or creation apart. Design is your creation’s identity - don’t let it be a mere echo of another identity.
- #37: v Great Resources to Steal From Scotch.io CodePen Material design - Google CoDrops Dribbble Pinterest
- #40: Edison - patent office races Einstein - afraid his work would be presented by collaborator before he could make it known (build out solution slide with this information) Build out - contact information, UWG History repeats itself - how we got from Model T to today Cultural aspects - China (borrowing or enhancing?) Highlight big words (words of importance) Refine timing - know where you are in the presentation write entire word for versus Remove abbreviations Revisit roadmap Remove unused slides Add more information about WHAT you’re saying to steal Visit how state ownership works as far as your employment Add more information about copyright ins + outs + how to defend against theft Enlarge slides Ensure all citations are very well documented on references page Don’t switch slides without switching topic - info should Roadmap - don’t go through everything Involve people by asking rhetorical question - then answer via slide transition Consolidate some slides into lists - be aware of what next slide will be Include definition of steal