Comment by mnicole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnicole | Hacker News Reader

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I think that this is part of a bigger problem; a lot of people find design to be "easy" in that it's subjective - Client A doesn't like your work but Client B does. Can't even get a job in the field? No worries, people flock to 99Designs and Fiverr for cheap, tacky work that validates the crummy designer. Working for someone with no morals? They'll show you some styles they like and tell you they want it "exactly" like that, and if you want a paycheck, you'll do it and maybe you'll learn something about the technique that you can translate into more original works. Some people just honestly don't think they'll ever be caught or that they have a right to be "heavily-inspired" because "you don't own that".

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.

I think the problem is people confuse design and aesthetics a lot. Design is inherently meant to be universal, and obviously if something is really well designed it does make the product compelling and attractive.

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?

I totally agree with you re: design vs. aesthetics (even went on a tangent about it some weeks ago).

> 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!

While there are cases (like you mentioned), it's also the designer's part to hustle a bit. If one has the skills and the know-how, they can be unstoppable if they want to.

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.

This has nothing to do with the hustle; this is post-hustle - that's why these companies are even reaching out to the artists directly. The ones that know exactly who they're trying to copy are the worst offenders.

> 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.

Yep, designers sell their designs whereas developers sell their expertise. It's this way because that's what the market wants right now. When companies start to hire designers because their good and not because their portfolio contains stuff they've never seen before, designers will become more open.

Pretty much true. FlatUI is great, but as a designer, you will want to build something more unique and while FlatUI could be a good start, it will not be the end product. For a developer, fast prototyping and building normally means that one simply utilise the top layer element from repo like this(FlatUI) and focus more on the underlying code.

Thank you for posting this.

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