Copying is the way design works

As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too.

I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is communicate the best solution to a problem, given the requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality is subordinate to that at best.

This is a great quote:

In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”

Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines.

We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses.

Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives. Most if not all steps forward in any field have hundreds of people clawing at similar ideas concurrently.

Beautifully written article. One of my first ideological shifts happened when Napster was released. Bits flowing freely without being bounded by rules of the physical world deeply changed me and while later I do understand artists need to get paid and make a living, piracy and the pirating community is still very close to my heart. The amount of innovation which comes out of that space, is tremendous. The fact that zuckerberg could create trillions of dollar on free projects such as php and apache is not cherished enough.

I think we still haven't found a proper economy for the digital world. The fact that pirating game of thrones was a better option than waiting for it to be premiered in your region goes to show there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. If there wasn't piracy, free software, open source and american VC (the first few waves, not the last few), this industry wouldn't have grown at this pace.

Go further.

If you model ideas mathematically, you will see that societies plagued with IPDD (https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html) will become extinct, because they prolong the lifespan of bad ideas, and those with intellectual freedom, where bad ideas rapidly evolve into good ideas, will rise to the top of the food chain. The equation is simple: ETA! (https://breckyunits.com/eta.html)

Question whether we should even have a concept of "licenses" (hint: we shouldn't). Look up "freedom licenses", which "freed" African Americans used to have to carry around in the 1800's. Think about how future generations will look at us for having a concept of "licenses on ideas". Think about the natural progression of automatic licenses on ideas (copyright act of 1976), to breathing: there is no reason not to require "licenses" to breathe, given that you exhale carbon dioxide molecules just as you exhale "copyrighted" information.

Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior.

Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.

I can make cheap, small-scale facsimiles, fangzhipin, to demonstrate some quality of the original. I can make exact replicas, pixel-perfect fuzhipin, to learn how the originals and their creators work. Or I can create shanzhai, unsolicited redesigns, commenting and riffing on the work of others. All these copies have an important role to play in the process of design.

Whether you believe that it’s worthwhile or worthless to copy, whether you think that copies are a valuable part of the design community or a scourge, you are using software, hardware, websites and apps that all owe their existence to copying.

As long as there is design, there will be copying.

There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make it for their customer. A tailor can change a collar or stitch to match what anyone wants.There was no demand that every worker have a unique design - everyone understood it was made to order. When it becomes possible to scale a design to worldwide sales, then the claims of uniqueness seem to us to become more important - but should they?

You sorta want to use affordance, when Apple creates a new type of UI, it’s usually because the introduced new tech. Like recent Samsung copy cat AirPods, they cannot invent a new UI because they are not the innovators, so they need to borrow affordances from Apple.

On why they copy the shape and size, that is the part where you can be more artistic, and it seems they have no taste.

(Affordance meaning using what people already is familiar with so they don’t have to relearn an interface)

One of the mistakes I made as a young designer was pushing back against trends and fads. My opinion at the time was that trends that weren't thought out from a position of UX principles were an anti-pattern to follow. As I matured more as a designer, I now think nearly the opposite - not following trends is an anti-pattern, since that's what your users will be used to.

Pull down to refresh is a great example of this. Not visible or discoverable at all, but was all the hype when Tweetie first released it. On paper it's an anti-pattern, but now it's so ingrained as a trend and pattern that it became expected, and is now muscle memory for many users.

The same goes with flat buttons - I used to be quite opposed to them since there was no visual elevation off the page designating it as a button. Now if you create a button with a bevel, users will think it's an ad, not part of the page itself.

Copying leads to harmony in the wider ecosystem, and it creates a defined agreement on what things are are how they work. It's an important part of the user experience.

For a visual form of the same argument, but more about music and film, see everything is a remix:

https://www.everythingisaremix.info/

It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned any discussion:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=everything+is+a+remix

Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- "Everything is a Remix" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level -- the article could be called a remix of the video.

The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking patents/IP law as anti-creative.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

"Functionally and aesthetically, the chairs are identical."

Listen dude, go ahead and buy the $145 Modway chair. It's so bad, it is $118 nowadays. It will literally fall apart under your ass. Read the reviews.

A manifesto, how retro.

Self taught artist, and I learned by copying my favorite comic books and painters.

Went to art school and a significant part of my art history class dealt in remembering the name of art "movements" which is a veiled way of saying a period when everyone was copying each other. Then of course you learn about the influential artists who heavily borrowed from xyz. Another funny one is "revival" which just means "straight up copy"

This is why I have limited sympathy for the uproar about AI art. It's just cutting through the boring part.

Side note: This is why I feel Stallman is more of a visionary and would have much more lasting impact than Jobs had (character flaws of both people not withstanding). Jobs stole and kept market dominance to keep the loot for himself. In medieval time, Jobs would be a raider. Stallman empowered the people and let them have fruits of their own labor.

Steve Jobs didn’t just waltz into Xerox PARC and steal a glimpse at the Alto. That visit was heavily lawyered and PARC got Apple shares as compensation. To summarize this as “stealing” is just incorrect. Lazy work.

Insightful perspective.

Maybe interesting to point out from what year it is. It looks like 2020.

As a former designer with a broad background (graphics, typography, print, web, product design) whenever I read something like this I get the feeling people generally have a misguided idea of what design is.

Many (bad) designers confuse what I would call styling with design. Design is a lot about functionality and how information is organized visually. These two core design points can only be copied if the underlying project is exactly the same in terms of underlying information. But even for two blogs about different topics the question which information needs to be presented how would be different — even if both blogs were using the browser's default CSS. This is the core of design.

Styling is finding colors, shapes proportions etc. All of this of course overlaps with the functional question and the question of organization of information — bigger buttons get more attention and all that — but ultimately you can slap more or less any style on any content. Whether it makes sense is a different question.

Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked.

"Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them.

It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."

I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.

Reminded me a short article: https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000324

We’re not designers, or programmers, or information architects, or copywriters, or customer experience consultants, or whatever else people want to call themselves these days… Bottom line: We’re risk managers.

Copying from one source is plagiarism. Copying from multiple sources is research.

The irony of copyright is that it demands copied design.

Want an online menu for your restaurant? Well, you can't just go copying someone else's design; so you must create your own from scratch. Will yours look and behave practically identically to the other? Yes. Will both websites be overall worse quality than if everyone just collaborated on a standard design? Yes. Would it save the world an incredible amount of redundant work to just allow people to copy each others' work? Yes. Who wins in this arrangement? Only those who have already won.

Keep looking at this pattern, and you will enter a deep cavernous rabbit-hole. At the bottom, you will find yourself at the very core of design itself: the goals, philosophies, and systemic failures of every design we use today can be traced back to this point: collaboration must be avoided at all costs. Compatibility is the cardinal sin, and it must be punished.

So we go on, building silos upon silos. When will we ever learn?

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There is a lot of talk lately for change. They say, "AI will be the end of copyright. It's too important to hold back the potential of AI over a petty argument for intellectual property." I don't believe for a minute that LLMs will ever reach the lofty goal of "General Intelligence". I don't believe for a minute that megacorps like OpenAI, Google, and Meta deserve a free pass to siphon data for profit. So why is it that these words ring true? AI has nothing to do with it: it's design itself that has incredible potential, and we should absolutely stop holding it back. Intellectual Property is nothing more than a demand against progress.

(2020)

The author got lost in his argumentation. He starts with design, but goes off into the lands of open source, patents, and art. It's not a well-written or researched article. Design is not software development is not art.

In a 2005 forum post, John Carmack explained his thoughts on patents. While patents are framed as protecting inventors, he wrote, that’s seldom how they’re used. Smart programmers working on hard problems tend to come up with the same solutions.

I find this happens in UI/UX design too. When you're trying to come with the best interface for a problem, there's only so many directions that make sense once you've explored the design space and understood all the constraints.

With desktop and mobile interfaces for example, all operating systems and devices have converged on a lot of similar patterns and visuals. I don't think this is because people are unoriginal, but given the constraints, there's only so many decent options to pick from so many designers will inevitably converge on the same solution.

I’m a designer. As a designer, I feel the need to be original.

I'll often come up with a solution on my own after immersing myself in a problem for a while, then after looking at existing work more later, find it's already been done. I'll then sometimes even consider changing my solution so it doesn't look like I copied, but usually there's no obvious other direction you can go in that is close to as good.

Even more strongly; Copying is the way we Learn.

I've always said: Good artists borrow, great artists steal. You can quote me on that.

“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” – Yohji Yamamoto.

As a designer, one eventually thinks not about what they liked in other people's work but why it worked. You can derive a design out a compendium of some things that you've seen that you like, but ultimately, to be successful you need to know why what you're copying made sense for its purpose. Perhaps you need to even encounter the same problem; it takes a bit of maturity to copy effectively.

This all great but for small time programmers trying to get a company off the ground, acting defensively is justifiable. It’s not always a question of a guy like Carmack having a good time cloning the big corp thing. Sometimes, and even many times lately it’s big corp obliterating inventive small business by releasing their own copy, or they simply use their monopolistic power to drive them into an inequitable sale.

If you’re small time and have a great idea, you’re better off going stealth and this is its own mitigation against destructive copying.

An interesting article about Asian perspectives on copying (https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just...)

This is relevant for me today since we are designing a new house. To go with an architect is looking like between $50k - $100k for basic building schematics and not the build plans. This seems like a lot to me. The route I'm going down now is finding houses I like on Zillow and hiring a Designer on Fivrr to basically copy them and create a 3D model in Revit that can eventually become building plans. So far the Fivrr Designer costs $100 per Zillow house to model into pretty good Revit plans that I could take to a Draftsman in my area to turn into building plans. It feels a little like cheating, but I've been seeing good results so far.

Re: The copied terracottas

Originality is overrated in art, painting restoration usually entails repainting large sections of the original. The image and the ideas far transcends the "original" which is usually reserved for bragging rights for uber rich collectors. The best art is the art you get to enjoy everyday.

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -- Igor Stravinsky

(Probably stolen)

But at $145 (the equivalent of $12.78 in 1947) it’s more affordable than the LCW was when it was first manufactured and sold.

The article isn’t explicitly dated (afaict). Using an inflation calculator leads me to believe it was written in 2019 [0]. The same calculator indicates a material deviation from the quoted number: “$145 in 2024 equals $10.16 in 1947.”

Amazingly, the chair is listed on Amazon now at $118.53 [1] (at least for my login/cookies/tracking; price includes shipping estimated at 6 days), the equivalent of $8.31 in 1947, a 60% off sale.

The cost probably has some externality tradeoffs however. Was the wood clear cut by children from thousand year old forests? Was the chair manufactured by prisoners using chemicals known by the state of California to cause cancer?

0. https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=145&ye...

1. https://www.amazon.com/Modway-EEI-510-WEN-Fathom-Mid-Century...

Data folks would do well to find some good visualizations (from the Economist or New York Times) and recreate them.

They will learn a lot from doing so.

There is no such thing as completely original. No matter what, all of your ideas are influenced by your life experience and what you've seen.

Back at uni a teacher used to say everything (in design, at least) has already been made - so yes, "creativity" was an act to put things that already exist and nobody thought about putting together before.

Good artists copy, great artists steal

- Pablo Picasso