Web Designer's Site Gets a Lot of Mentions, and then...

[Samwise89]

I saw this today and had to share it here. I wasn't sure whether to laugh, cry, or what. I'd definitely do exactly what this guy did, and screencap them all and post them for shame.

This guy designs his portfolio of sites he's designed for clients and writes up a "how I did it and thought it out" kind of post for some big web-designer magazine site, and then the story spreads. Before he knows it, there are tons of knock offs popping up.

Pepper Your Angus and check out the article.

I'd be so annoyed. Do you redesign to become unique again? What if people think YOU ripped off someone else. Arghhh.

Not sure how I'd handle it. Maybe have my design copyrighted as intellectual property and then send C&D's to their hosting company's?

 

[thamonsta]

I would be really frustrated. This guy handles it in a classy way and still gets to put them on blast.

I noticed that NONE OF THEM were as good as his. That says a lot about those other designers. Why would you take so much inspiration from something if you can't even improve on it? Taking an idea and improving on it is innovation but these clowns are just copying.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I saw an image of George R. R. Martin from the Song of Ice and Fire series (game of thrones), and he was quoted saying...

If you steal from one person, that's plaigerism.
If you steal from a ton of people, that's research.

I think that applies here for sure.

 

[built]

Really sad, I don't know how people can look themselves in the mirror after copying something exactly. Take a few elements here and there? sure. copy everything. so sad

 

[Fatbat]

I noticed that NONE OF THEM were as good as his. That says a lot about those other designers. Why would you take so much inspiration from something if you can't even improve on it?

It's because a great many people that call themselves "designers" don't know the first thing about good design. They got themselves a hacked copy of Adobe CS6, label themselves a designer and can fumble their way around the programs, but they don't know anything about composition, balance, use of white space, typography, colour theory, content presentation, branding, UI, UX...

Copying happens everywhere these days, and a large amount of it is done by people in developing countries (I hate to stereotype, but note the ethnicity of a large number of the people that copied the author of that article). It happens on all the design competition sites like 99 designs, and it happens in places like Behance, Logopond and Brandcrowd. Fortunately most of these people will have little to no impact on those that they copy and are generally insignificant when it comes to competing for jobs except among each other on shitty sites like 99 designs and the various freelancer portals.

Meh.

 

[Satvrn]

I'd be so annoyed. Do you redesign to become unique again? What if people think YOU ripped off someone else. Arghhh.

Not sure how I'd handle it. Maybe have my design copyrighted as intellectual property and then send C&D's to their hosting company's?

Why would you do that?
Is there a better sales argument than this? He could turn this into a great marketing opportunity. My designs are so awesome, people around the world rip them.

I think the dude should be happy.

 

[MetaData]

He could turn this into a great marketing opportunity.

This.

And it looks like that's exactly what happened.

Duck face aside, it's a cool homepage and now it's going to get so much recognition, I wouldn't be surprised if his inbox was filling up with gigs.

 

[CCarter]

If you aren't getting copied, you aren't anybody that anyone cares about. Reality is copying has been going on for years, decades, centuries. I've even got the competition copying me 6 months later, poorly by the way, but it happens. People lifted my writing style, my BST style, even tried to do some videos like me... and this is pretty low level trolling I'm getting copied on. So on a grand scale, if you want no one to copy you at some point - do nothing, say nothing, be nothing...

Everything brought to the forefront of any market is a remix, copy, or straight rip of something else. Some people make it a little different, then others come along, make it more different, and the cycle goes on and on.

It's like fashion, last years trends are going to get brought back in a decade as people go around and around in a remixing cycle. Original thought or ideas - it's difficult to say where the line is from "inspiration" to "stealing". We all have stared at that blank canvas in design or coding, or whatever.

A thought has to be formed from somewhere and it's usually inspired or gotten from an other or an outside influence, we do not live in a bubble as a society, so the designs and new products which come to the market or are seen have their origins in the past, ABSOLUTELY nothing just "conjures" into existence without influence.

How I got started in design and html/css scripting was I just ripped sites I liked - at first blatantly. I took their javascript and stripped down the code until it was just that one part I wanted. This was in an era before Google, and there was no access to ideas, design, and coding like there is now. There was no library for javascript, css, or major resource center, so if I saw something on American Express's website I went into the code, stripped it down line by line, until I got the functionality I wanted, then I re-made it into my own concept. Eventually it I decided to improve upon the idea, and make my own "remix" of it.

The designer above must be new to the Earth, cause people have been stealing for generations at a time, ideas get stolen, styles of art, whole operating systems like Windows taking from Apple what Apple took from Xerox - at the end of the day, there is nothing that anyone can do about it. If you get rid of "stealing" or try to "suppress" it, further down the line you'll have to suppress "inspiration" as well. At that point, you'll just be left with a blank canvas... where will you go from there?