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.”
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.
(It feels very grumpy-old-man to complain about "low effort", but I think it's more culturally relevant than ever before...)
... not investigating your field is a massive low effort failure mode. You don't have to know your field, but you have to investigate it, appreciate it, draw upon it... even, or perhaps especially, if you're standing in opposition to it.
(This is also why "first principles" twits like Elon are so annoying...)
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
Well I did not learn to write, but came to appreciate a certain kind of minimalism by using a recursive 4-stages narrative model (Greimas) to study some novels by Haruki Murakami.
What really struck me was the fact every single segment down to the level of phrases had a well-delimited function with respect to the rest of the story. A well told story is like a perfect tiling. No gaps that couldn't possibly be closed, no overlap, every tile well-delimited and composing nicely with its neighbors, and more importantly, a way to decompose well aligned tiles (summaries) into well-aligned subtiles (elaborations): if these conditions are met, you'll be able to write a story that conserves something at every scale, i.e. coherence, and hopefully the interest of the reader!
Jazz musicians also copy each other's solos for learning and practice purposes, but they would never actually perform more than a couple well placed quotes or licks from another player.
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).
why not? I'm curious what you define as "property". Does property have to be physical?
For example if you felt your body and your mind was your property, if someone else copied your mind and was now profiting off of that without your consent, would you not feel that harmful to you?
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:
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 73.6 ms ] threadStill hurts to be the one being stolen from though.
... not investigating your field is a massive low effort failure mode. You don't have to know your field, but you have to investigate it, appreciate it, draw upon it... even, or perhaps especially, if you're standing in opposition to it.
(This is also why "first principles" twits like Elon are so annoying...)
Stealing is stealing unless you're really good at it.
I would say that there is a big difference between stealing without acknowledgement, and stealing with acknowledgement and actively learning through reverse engineering.
Stealing in this context might be tad harsh.
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.
If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work.
It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters.
This seems like the web design version of this.
What really struck me was the fact every single segment down to the level of phrases had a well-delimited function with respect to the rest of the story. A well told story is like a perfect tiling. No gaps that couldn't possibly be closed, no overlap, every tile well-delimited and composing nicely with its neighbors, and more importantly, a way to decompose well aligned tiles (summaries) into well-aligned subtiles (elaborations): if these conditions are met, you'll be able to write a story that conserves something at every scale, i.e. coherence, and hopefully the interest of the reader!
> 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)
For example if you felt your body and your mind was your property, if someone else copied your mind and was now profiting off of that without your consent, would you not feel that harmful to you?
I’m very curious what “herbicide” was an auto-complete for here…
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:
https://www.swipe.com/about
In GURPS, stealing is two skills: filch and pickpocket.
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.
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.