Am I taking inspiration? Am I stealing?
How I’ve learned to overcome my guilty feeling when I take inspiration from others’ work as a designer.
As a designer, when I look for inspiration it seems harder and harder for me to find unique work. Only a few designers stand out for their original style. To be honest, taking inspiration from other’s work has always made me feel guilty.
I remember having a discussion with my first creative director about this topic. At the time, He told me, “we don’t have to re-invent the wheel in every design”. Well, reinventing the wheel was exactly what I thought it meant to be on the path of a creative. To be original, to stand out, that was the only thing I was striking for at the time. Creating a ‘new wheel’ without the help of anyone else, with only my own creative resources.
That guilty feeling, on the one hand, could be helpful to force me to come up with an original idea, but on the other hand, it was slowing down my designing process. It could be difficult and frustrating to go so slow. So what’s the deal? It looks like a no-win situation, you either create something unoriginal and feel guilty or you need to spend all your time figuring out how to create a ‘new wheel’. Is there any way to take inspiration without feeling bad about it?
Am I taking inspiration? Am I stealing? Those are questions that I always ask myself whenever I try to be creative. The answers are not so clear. I’m Alioune and I feel guilty about taking inspiration. Am I the only one?
Why it’s so easy today
In this information age there’s so much going on, everything is quick and accessible in a click. Portfolio websites, Dribbble, Behance, Pinterest, and Instagram profiles are only a few of the many great sources of inspiration that we have access to.
If we consider that in the past artists had to travel for days in order to look at a few artworks at a time, copying at the time was difficult for physical reasons, in the first place.
Today, designers can show and express their work without traveling. Every single day we can open Dribbble and look at dozens of shots in less than 10 seconds. Is this awesome? Yes. Unless it becomes a stealing arena where the most valuable skill is to just copy the most trendy design. Taking inspiration vs copying is a big grey area where It’s almost impossible to define who is copying and who is taking a healthy dose of inspiration.
Everyone is doing it
With time I realized a key aspect that helped me to cope with that feeling of guiltiness and lack of originality. The truth is that we can’t help copying. Whenever you start with a new creative project, even if you avoid completely any source of inspiration, you are still subconsciously copying.
No matter how hard you try to detach yourself from inspirational sources like Dribbble, our brain is already full of ideas and images created by someone else. There is no such thing as starting with a blank sheet. Whether you are collecting inspiration bits on your Pinterest board or you don’t, you always start with something already in your mind.
“There is no such thing as starting with a blank sheet.”
The only way you could really start from scratch is by using a Neuralyzer; the tool used in Men in Black to wipe out your mind, and you would have to do it before every project 😵. Otherwise, we are copying machines, this is how we, as humans, work.
For this reason, I finally realized that we don’t have a choice to re-invent the wheel in every design. Actually, we can’t.
Every innovative idea is always a better version of an older idea or a combination of them. We have already thousand of ideas imprinted in our brains as soon as we are exposed to the outer world.
Great artists steal
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
— Pablo Picasso
I was already familiar with Picasso’s quote “ Good artists borrow, great artists steal”. Does it mean that if we want to be great we need to steal everything?
I decided to dig in and in searching for the true meaning of Picasso’s words I found out what he really meant. To borrow something implies that we will give it back while stealing implies that we keep it for ourselves. In this sense, what Picasso meant was that to being a great artist you must look at someone’s work with special attention, studying it until you absorb the essence of what you like and why it works so well. Understanding the process behind the creation allows you to re-use what inspired you while still making it your own. In that way, you’re not copying but ‘stealing’, by making it yours.
In order to be original, we need to absorb and digest ideas from different sources, then we want to connect all the insights into a unique outcome that is shaped by our own interpretation and personal experience. This is how we add some value.
To make an example. Some time ago a new trend on Dribbble caught my eye. Plenty of inspirational shots of landing pages were following the same new style: asymmetrical squares and rectangles of different sizes with a bold usage of primary colors. It was clearly inspired by the abstract painting style of
Piet Mondrian, known to be one of the founders of the De Stijl movement in 1917.
In this example, the essence of Mondrian’s work has been readjusted and translated into a new outcome. The usage of asymmetrical simple shapes, modular blocks and few primary colors with the addition of today’s digital techniques such as animated carousels and original transitions, creates something new, something unique and unexpected.
The wrong side
Of course, there is still a bad way of copying. If we make a clone of someone else’s idea and we present it as our own, with the intention of not doing the work. It is not only disrespectful but also illegal. This is plagiarism.
Imitation has its place when we take our first steps into a new field. It’s a great tool for learning the basics and for practicing. However, if we want to jump to the next level and move forward we need to push ourselves, and to add some value.
Guiltometer
In conclusion, it’s easy to grab an idea from someone else, change a few details and then resell it. However, this is only a quick fix. In the long-term, we are harming ourselves by losing the ability to be original.
I’ve learned to take a step back and honestly asking myself, how can I add some value to what has been already created? This is what gives me room to improve and eventually what creates the base for innovative work I can be proud of.
What this self-reflection has taught me is that the sense of guilt is just a signal that I am not improving. I’m not feeding that creative part of me that drove me into this profession in the first place. When I feel guilt it’s a sign that I’m not adding enough value to an existing idea. I’ve also learned how to be less harsh with myself and how to find my own balance. Because in the end, everybody is copying.
