Drawar

Nothing you do is original. Creativity isn’t about being original. So many designers worry about being original that they get nothing done. They sit there and scoff at the designers that copy others and think they are cheaters and low lifes. We all know what Picasso said and I would put down money that he stole that quote from his buddy at a bar one night.

If you want to get better at your profession, sooner or later you will have to copy. Hopefully it is at the beginning of your education and not the end when it is time to start making money. Whenever you wish to learn you do so by mimicking others that you observe. Maybe you wish to learn Photoshop and to do so you picked up a book. You are simply copying what someone else has done and graciously decided to pawn it off as education.

If copying is okay, then why is it so frowned upon when designers directly copy designs of other sites? Because copying doesn’t mean you are doing a direct pixel by pixel copy. It means that you are copying the idea behind it, transforming it and making it your own. That is the combination that we call creativity.

Apple Copies

When it comes to Apple many of us are quick to throw around the word innovation, myself included. However, nothing Apple does is something that hasn’t been seen before. They simply remix great ideas from different places and are able to combine them into wonderful products. There were touch screen phones way before the iPhone, but down the road (and even now), people associate touch screen phones with Apple.

In fact, many arguments against Apple will usually point out how Apple has merely copied another company or product. “That was done before by…” is often said and yet Apple usually does it better. When they don’t do it better, like iOS notifications, they have no problem at looking how others do it better, copying them and adding their own transformation to it.

Great Designers Transform

To spinoff of the famous Picasso quote, I think great designers are able to transform ideas and design elements they come across into new uses. The lack of designers with this talent is sometimes disheartening because you encounter so many copycats. However, looking at Dribbble and Behance you can see that there are a large number of designers that are very capable of transforming design experiences into what we sometimes might believe are original takes.

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

Henry Ford

Take that quote to heart and maybe you will find you approach design a bit differently. It’s not about reinventing the wheel. It is about seeing if the current wheel works perfectly for your problem and if not then maybe it can be transformed to make the perfect solution for your problem. Many times this mean looking at other areas to see how things are done. The best places to copy from are rarely within the same category as the problem you are trying to solve.

I’m not going to tell you to go out and copy because you have been doing it for years already. I’m just telling you to add your own layer to the copy.