How stealing design can make you a better designer 23rd & Walnut Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 14, 2016 Obviously don’t rip off someone else’s design, that’s not going to help you improve. But there’s nothing wrong with allowing yourself to be heavily inspired by designers that are better than you. In fact, it’s probably one of the most efficient ways to learn and become a better designer. Good artists copy, great artists steal — Pablo Picasso/ Steve Jobs The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. — Albert Einstein This isn’t a new idea. People have been learning by stealing for a very long time, and it’s not something anyone should be ashamed about. Most people’s first work is a derivative of someone else’s work. This is true of product design, web design, coding, fine art, writing, and virtually every other discipline. Here are two well known examples Andy Warhol, an extremely popular and successful artist, created The Last Supper, which is a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s original The Last Supper

Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (left), Andy Warhol’s version (right)

Apple’s iOS multi-tasking interface is copied from Palm’s webOS Palm’s webOS (2009), Apple iOS multi-tasking introduced (2013) What’s the purpose of stealing? By emulating things we see, we’ll become more comfortable with the specific ideas that constitute a good design, and as we learn more, we’ll be able to put our own twist on those ideas and come up with something original. Emulation alone isn’t enough, the key to learning and ultimately becoming better, is to also think critically about what you’re copying. Try to understand why the original designer made the choices that he/she made. It might take a while, but you’ll start to notice patterns in good design. Try to pay attention to things like spacing/white space, typography, colors, and visual hierarchy Anatomy of a stolen design: Here’s a practical example. I recently needed to re-do my portfolio site. The previous version of the site was several years old, it hadn’t been updated in a while, and it felt like it was reflecting poorly on my brand. I’m in the middle of a couple of projects, so I didn’t want to spend too much time on it, and knew that my best option was start with a few sites to draw inspiration from. Gathering my sources I’ve been really into minimalist designs lately, and I keep an evernote folder of sites that inspire me, so the first step was going through that folder and finding sites that had a similar look and purpose as my vision for my new portfolio site. Here are the sites that I chose to use as inspiration:

http://wearecircle.at/ Source #1: CRCL This is an extremely minimalist site, with a beautiful sans-serif font that I love. I’m a person that likes to get straight to the point, and this site does that exactly that. The first thing you see is a statement that describes their value, with no visual distractions.

http://palookaville.no/ Source #2: Palookaville This is by far my favorite site on the list. I’ve always loved text based sites on a white background with vivid imagery. It looks extremely simple, but in reality its very difficult to pull this look off and have the site actually look good. Full screen hero areas are the current trend, but I love that the portfolio items ‘peek’ up from the bottom. I also love the accent color in their value statement.

http://www.stinkdigital.com/ Source #3: Stink Digital Just like the previous site, this one opens with a value statement. I really like the use of color in this statement to draw in the user’s attention to specific words. I also like the way the portfolio is laid out, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time to create graphics like this for each of my portfolio items.

https://durkangroup.com/about-us/ Source #4: Durkan Group I’ve always loved sites that use this ‘typing’ animation effect. And it seems like a good way to say several things, without taking up a bunch of space on the page. You just cycle through all of the things you want to say. I’ve used this effect before.