Designers are magpies

In the last day there was a big brouhaha at one of my favorite blog sites — let’s call her deuce — because someone had blatantly stolen her design for their own site. Now Deuce, being a designer who needs to be paid for her work, was pretty damned pissed off and made no bones about how she felt about it. And the comments on her site agreed, to the point of threats of adding the imitator’s email address to know spam lists, etc.

Well, I went to the site and although the basic page design (layout, white space, typography, rules) were stolen, it was still a second rate knockoff with none of the panache and wit of Deuces’ site. To make matters worse, as I read the knockoff site it became clear that it was the blog of a recently divorced woman who was writing about her struggle with cancer. Suddenly the theft of some white space and rules and 11px Georgia didn’t seem like such a big deal.

This morning Deuces’ post and all of the responses have been taken down, but the bad taste lingers.

Designers are magpies, irresistably drawn to bright, shiny white space, stealing a bit from here, a bit from there, and calling it their own. The important distinction is that good designers add clarity and enhance the message of what they’re designing for. Bad designers just steal and apply, mindlessly.

Web design has encouraged the sharing of code — first, because it’s there for all to see and, second, because designing using html and xhtml is a real pain in the ass and generous designers want their comrades to avoid unnecessary pain. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not talking about the wholesale rip-off of a site — I think that it’s unfair to take someone’s creative work without adding your own labor before calling it your own.

The second and, for me, bigger problem that this fiasco points out, is the mindless piling on that happens on the web. Deuce had every right to be upset about the appropriation of her creative work, but she might have explored the other site a little bit before expressing her rage. And the people who piled on, many of whom have incredibly lame sites, might have cooled their invective (I mean, come on, hoping that someone will die because they stole your leaded rules? Give me a break.)

Posted by timswan at November 14, 2002 10:13 AM