While Designers seem secretive, ego-filled and seeking pointless exclusivity.
Eg: Developers: HackerNews / Github, etc Designers: DesignerNews / Dribble, Forrst, etc.
Any designer that has been open about his work and process has become a legend - Dieter Rams, Johnathan Ive, etc.
I know for me, personally, I've put many design projects on GitHub - from the mockups to assets to the code to put a site together - knowing there's a chance someone will use it verbatim but hoping it gets used as a jumping off point or customized to make it someone else's.
With design, you can see when someone has ripped you off very obviously most of the time. You can't own design elements of course but its a very subjective thing that you just know when you see it. Developers and designers also think very differently in some areas. With developers everything is logical and black and white. With designers, much of their work is vague, fluid, and incredibly subjective. Emotion plays a role in the success of design often times whereas a developer's code will be just as useful and functional no matter how anyone feels about it. As a developer, when I open source something, I know that I can't own the concept of a loop or a database query or whatever. What makes my code unique is the way in which I solve my problem and how it solves a problem that other code has not solved. I'd be happy if someone forked my code, made it better, and started a new project from it that became popular. However I'd be upset if someone took my design, added on to it, and passed it off as their own. The difference? On the surface there shouldn't be one. But beyond the surface it's all about the piece of yourself you put into design work.
Hopefully this makes sense and doesn't just sound like rambling. I'm sure I may need to clarify a few things I said so please ask if I said something vague.
I've been inspired by many and have inspired a few designs as well, but rather than being bitter about it, I follow the thought process of my primal developer instinct - Did they make it better or worse? If they did make it better, what did they do differently, What can I learn from them, etc.
While I do get pissed off about blatant copying, I can't condone what LayerVault did in this instance - Block DesignModo's original designs which were allegedly[1] inspired by LayerVaults icons.
[1] - Various other entities (The Noun Project, Facebook, etc) have had similar icons (Settings Cog, Man Speech bubble, Newsfeed icon) a lot earlier than LV.
http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/ has been around for awhile, but now with Pinterest, Dribbble and other resources, it's becoming a lot more common to find the people who are making it difficult for designers to feel like they can truly stand out.
Outside of flat copying/pasting code, it takes a little more to get it to be functional. By nature, lots of developers are working in teams where collaboration/pair programming is promoted to begin with. You work on projects where it is essential to team up to figure out what's going on and what could make it better. In order to ensure the project continues to move forward and work, there needs to be a method to the madness that everyone understands. At the agencies I've worked at, while everyone was a designer, we all had our specialties and we didn't really work together much outside of talking about general branding guidelines/techniques, etc.
In design, all it takes is having the same software to mimic something. So when someone that is actually doing honest-to-goodness original, clever stuff gets jacked by the hacks-at-large, it is easy to get defensive and want to lock it down, particularly when you make your livelihood getting clients that like your style and it is suddenly watered down by clones and you're not getting paid to do what you made popular anymore. On Dribbble, I've seen it go so far down the hole that people have both claimed the original artist was the hack or said "Really reminds me of [hack]'s work.." on someone's copy of a copy.
Design cannot be copied, while aesthetics can.
One can copy a single design - say an icon for example, but they cannot copy the original designer's workflow and thought-process in coming up with the final design, it is and always will be unique to each individual. A copy-cat can't come up with an entire icon-set after copying a single icon, whereas the original designer can. And I seriously doubt good designers not getting work due to scummy photocopiers grabbing up jobs.
In regards to 99Designs & Fiverr:
The only requirement of a client on there is that it needs to look good. And it's easy to make something look good, but does that work with their overall product? Does the product even have a design language of its own?
And usually the clients are low-budget shops which even if they wanted to can't afford a decent designer. The same problem exists for developers as well - Do we see top developers crying foul about their code being re-used?
> And I seriously doubt good designers not getting work due to scummy photocopiers grabbing up jobs.
Knowing some very well-known designers, I can assure you that they are losing work. Big companies reach out to these artists about their style and how much it would cost, and after not hearing anything for a few months, these companies magically show up with a new ad campaign or line of t-shirts that looks all-too-familiar. I know a good illustrator that works for a company where he is asked to copy works created by his own friends in the industry. Not all of them are bad at what they do, which is why they are hired instead. It's slimy work, but if you're good at it and can churn them out, it makes for easy income until you can break out on your own. I would wager that a lot of designers begin their careers this way. Some eventually make their way out of it to stand on their own two feet while others get comfortable with the fact that they are essentially paid to plagiarize based on what's hot right now.
> Do we see top developers crying foul about their code being re-used?
This is irrelevant, but when we're talking about front-end stuff, yes. We just saw a witch hunt here the other week. But as far as the rest it's not really comparable; developers are being paid to come up with solutions that work within a set of rules we all have to adhere to given the technologies available. Designers are being paid to come up with solutions that are intentionally unique. Code is on the web as-is, and outside of not giving credit where credit should be due, there's not really much you can do about someone copying a few lines that are part of languages that can only be written effectively so many different ways. With visuals, there really are no rules; how I created my illustration may have been an entirely different way than someone who copied it did, but it doesn't matter because the end product is the same. As we progress into using SVGs for artwork instead of images, it'll be interesting to see how these worlds collide and if we begin diffing code on a large scale to find copycats rather than use tools like TinEye.
While this means that remixing pieces will be easier and I hope that's the direction we go (and embrace), it still means the originals are a simple copy and paste away from being stolen in their full vector glory. Can't wait!
Tangential to your example: I knew an illustrator who used to sketch animals in a cartoon-style, but she kept at it and eventually got hired by Rovio. But she didn't get the role just for her skills, she got it because she hustled - made an Angry Birds' fan-video and made a physical copy of it and mailed it to Rovio.
Talent alone won't help in succeeding, only persistence will. Heck, talent can be acquired, persistence on the other hand, mostly isn't.
Also, original art/design will always get credit if it is promoted properly.
> Also, original art/design will always get credit if it is promoted properly.
This is simply not true, which is why Twitter is often a platform used for calling people out.
I say this because (in general), whilst developers would not violate a license or steal code, they would often happily implement the same idea someone else had from scratch without any qualms. You can see this in how the notion of patents are despised in software far more than other industries.
Perhaps for developers, ideas are easy and implementations are hard, whilst for designers the reverse is true.
In any case, copyright is about the concrete. You can't - or at least shouldn't be able to - use the DMCA to prevent people expanding on your ideas or being inspired them. Unless an artifact has been copied, there is no copyright violation.
This seems counter-intuitive to some designers, but at the same time seems obvious to developers.
In this particular case, there is no copying and no copyright violation. That is obvious. There is also as much evidence that FlatUI was inspired by LayerVault's work, as there is that LayerVault was inspired by other work already created.
The DMCA takedown was wrong legally, and strategically, but despite the reaction LayerVault don't seem to realise this. Sadly for them their business will probably suffer for it, and they've probably made FlatUI a lot more popular.
There is only one MD5. There is only one preorder traversal of a binary tree. Creativity is essential, but unless you do those kinds of things the same way as everyone else, you're doing them wrong and will get the wrong results.
As far as I know, nobody got DMCAed by the inventors of either for writing one.
Yet here, we have designers trying to claim ownership of a particular set of colours and a vague notion of style. Both of which were around before their "implementation" was.
> Yet here, we have designers trying to claim ownership of a particular set of colours and a vague notion of style.
Exactly my point.
The underlying method is an idea, not an implementation. It is not subject to copyright.
It might be patentable in some places, but that has nothing to do with the DMCA.
Developers generally scorn software patents (owning an idea) but respect copyright (owning an implementation).
The designers here are trying to assert copyright over an idea, which you absolutely cannot do.
I don't guess you're a developer or coder.
Being that the speed of MD5 has increased greatly on the same hardware over the years has shown there are many, if not infinite ways of finding an md5sum. Essentially code is math and number are infinite. You could calculate a number with multiplication and call it NumberTwizzle(TM), I could then look at your formula and write a new formula with bit shifts that runs twice and outputs the exact same answer. I could not call it NumberTwizzle though.
>Creativity is essential, but unless you do those kinds of things the same way as everyone else,
This partial sentence, I don't even. Creativity is looking at what other people are doing and coming up with a 'better', 'cheaper', or 'faster' (maybe all) solution to an existing problem. doing 'things' the same way as everyone else is the exact opposite of creativity.
Bloody lol at your Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ive quip. They were famous before people asked them for their design values to big-up in the media.
But you raise a good point, the design world is very different to the developer world and hacker values could very well be valuable if implemented in the design world, just not sure how one would go about such things.
In other words, I don't think Layervault would feel any different if there was a comment in the HTML giving them attribution.
Regarding the comment in the HTML, you are right, it won't make them feel better, because the design really is meant to look at. It doesn't matter how clever the source code is. That's the disadvantage the designers have, I was just saying I can understand them.
As a developer, I get to _chose_ how someone uses my code. I can release my code, and attach one of any number of licenses, which give another developer _permission_ to use my code, while laying out restrictions.
If that license is violated, there is a legal recourse for me (and one which is used quite often to enforce things like the GPL, etc.)
Within the development community, this is the accepted protocol for how you "borrow" code from another developer. Violating this protocol is pretty much universally reviled.
But the same universal revulsion doesn't exist for design.
Unless you literally copy and paste someone's actual file.
And I think that's where the disconnect comes from.
In development, the hard work is in the typing, not the idea, really. If I see an animation effect I like, or a feature from a competitor's product, there's still a massive effort I have to undertake to recreate it. The "work" in development is in the work itself, not in the idea.
Obviously there are cases where this isn't true. Novel design patterns, component compositions, etc. exist. But I'm going for an 80/20 discussion here.
In design, the work itself is generally secondary to all the upfront effort work of the "idea". A designer will throw away a dozen, if not more, failed attempts at an idea. Minor things like color, shape, typeface, will be iterated on over and over again, until something takes form that looks "correct". Once they've reached that climax though, the actually complexity of the end product might be minimal.
Recreating all of that designer's choices is beyond simple, so long as you have the software. Even if you don't literally trace their image, all of the "work" has been done for you.
Designers at the caliber you speak of rely on, and can articulate, their (timeless) fundamental principles more than your average designer, who heavily relies on their moment in time where their work is relevant before fading into obscurity.
To the point, we actually started a repo for Sketch.app Templates, and the Sketch team is working on making their files non binaries so that we can better merge.
https://github.com/sketch-templates
R.
If what you were saying were true, there would be no tutorials on how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. There would be no tutorials on how to create specific effects in the above. There would be no Noun Project. There would be no schools for Graphic Design. There would be no open source icon sets, or free typefaces.
You design something for your loved one, and see it end up as campaign for a multimillion dollar business. You design your product with love, just with the right and personal style and see it to end up as commodity. Those things feel like worst kind of abuse if you didn't expect or want them to happen. There is bit similar kind of outrage when corporations use open source code and don't share it back.
Design and brands are also identifying and they build trust and value, so copying design is bit like stealing your identity, name or face. If someone somehow uses your code without your permission, almost no-one will notice that it's _your code_ running in the backend.
And this is not the same discussion as pirating music or movies, those are products made to consume, and their value doesn't decrease when people use it more. But for example using Bootstrap default design doesn't really bring up trust or anything positive anymore since some many people are using it, so usage decreases the value of a specific design.
As a final note, fashion and design of course runs on getting inspired by other people's work and that's how it should be be. However even something isn't illegal, it doesn't mean it's ethical or nice.
(You may also notice that both Rams and Ive talk about their designs or process post-mortem, so they can choose the parts and the way they want to talk about it.)
One related example is the sculpture in downtown Portland, Oregon, called Portlandia. The City owns the sculpture, but the artist owns the rights to any images of it, and he does not allow pictures to be taken and reproduced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(statue)
Regarding Jony Ive, I disagree that he has been very open about his work and process. I think he rightly has become a legend, but it has happened without him seeking the spotlight. The spotlight has found him, instead.
When you say that designers seek "pointless exclusivity", it's a lot like saying that hackers spend their time doing "pointless tweaking". Exclusivity is the currency of design. When you design something, and ten million people already have crappy variations of the same design, your design has lost all of that currency.
Good Design will and always strives to be universal. It's funny that the recent Flat-design trend was triggered by Microsoft's Metro UI, which is inspired by Modern Cities' signage (universal design).
Also, isn't the point of icons to be iconic? How can one seek exclusivity over an icon, the Settings Cog, which is almost universally used.
LayerVault and the people behind it jumped at this for cheap publicity and to assert themselves over a new and upcoming design firm.
Good Design doesn't sell. Great Design does. Great design will achieve exclusivity by iteratively attempting (and failing) to become universal.
> It's funny that the recent Flat-design trend was triggered by Microsoft's Metro UI, which is inspired by Modern Cities' signage
Which was probably inspired by Mondrian's experiments in exclusivity.
I'm a hacker and I think most hackers (including myself) often spend too much time pointlessly tweaking things.
Your emacs shortcuts are okay. Promise! Just get to work.
Your linux kernel is fine. Yes all the network drivers are configured well enough. Yes samba shares are working, yes rsyinc is copying stuff around. Just get to work.
Yes, X is perfectly configured and compiz is doing its thing. Yes it is! Just get to work.
I promise your IDE has the perfect amount of widgets in just the right place! Start coding.
And so on :)