You often hear designers say, “Good designers copy. Great designers steal.”
Well, anyone who says this is one of three types of designers:
One who copies, one who steals or one who admits that not copying and stealing is hard but still tries not to anyway.
For some reason, a lot of web designers believe that there’s nothing truly unique left to create and that there is no such thing as originality.
I disagree, or at least I don’t want to accept that notion. You shouldn’t either.
Designers who copy
These people are at the bottom of the design pyramid, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You have to start somewhere.
Designers who copy are novices who haven’t yet grasped what makes a great design great, and so they imitate.
They frequent web galleries, pick a site they like and find a way to recreate and adapt it to the project at hand. This is how anyone learns anything. In fact, this is how we learn to, among other things, walk and talk as babies. We imitate to build a foundation of experience.
Continue reading “Great Designers Steal” on Webdesigner Depot.