Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
- Pablo Picasso
When I started my career in design, I struggled to come up with ideas.
I failed miserably in the first 6 months.
Every time I would sit down to create a masterpiece, I would create a mess.
When my mentor advised me to first copy designs as an initial learning step, I was always upset and struggled with Imposter Syndrome.
There were times when I thought, “Maybe designing is just not my cup of tea. A career in designing will remain a fantasy.
But somehow I managed to sail through the tough days and overcome my fears.
Today, after 2 years into designing I am the Design Head in an AI startup in Bengaluru.
But this article is not about how to become a good designer.
Today, I want to ask you, “Is it okay to copy or steal designs or ideas?”
I will tell you why this question popped up in my head.
Recently, I was training an intern in my team and he seemed to struggle with creating something original.
I told him, “Just copy an existing design and innovate on it to create something new.”
After telling him to copy, I started thinking if I was mentoring him the right way.
How should beginners learn to design?
Is there a proven way for designers to grow?
Is it okay to copy something and innovate it to create something new?
Is it ethical to steal ideas?
Let’s look at history to understand it better.
Steve Jobs in one of his interview(1994) about the creation of the Apple Macintosh says, “ It comes down to trying to expose yourselves to the best things that humans have done and trying to bring those things into what you are doing. Picasso had a saying that ‘Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal ‘. We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”
Copying is to replicate somebody’s work, like stroke to stroke, which is not acceptable in any manner and can cause defame and legal trouble but with stealing, here we are not referring to stealing objects, but stealing some selective ideas or elements from somebody else’s work and bringing them together creatively to implement our own idea in another unique way. Isn’t that creative!
Jean-Luc Godard said, “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take things to.”.
Giant Companies like Google, Apple were not the ones who came up with the idea first. Here are a few examples of not-so-original ideas turning into successful giants now:
Google was not the first company to come up with an idea of a Search Engine. There has been a long history of Search Engines that came before Google but the reason Google quickly became the dominant search engine was that it examined the number and relevance of links between pages that others didn’t do.
APPLE’s Ipad
The idea of an iPad wasn’t the first one to come in the market but the first to win over. Microsoft came with the idea of a tablet much before Apple did but the question is why Apple leads the idea now?
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Bill Gates explained that “Jobs did some things better than I did. His timing in terms of when it came out, the engineering work, just the package that was put together. The tablets we had done before, weren’t as thin, they weren’t as attractive.”
So it’s not just the idea, no idea is original, its the whole dressing of it that makes it worth.
ROMEO AND JULIET
The famous tragic play, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, was based on a poem written in 1562 by Arthur Brooke titled, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Shakespeare was able to add his style in the play and gave it an end that was different from the original poem, is what made him one of the most accomplished playwright.
So by sharing these examples, my only intention was to emphasize that ideas can be stolen but how you make those ideas yours and execute it properly is that matters.
Austin Kleon in his New York Times bestseller book “STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST “ points out that no artist’s work is ever completely original, and that trying to be completely original will daunt an artist and eventually smothers his creativity. Mr. Kleon warns that he does not mean ‘steal’ as in plagiarise, skim or rip off — but study, credit, remix, mash-up, innovate and transform. Creative work builds on what came before, and thus nothing is completely original.
Let’s modify the quote this way — ‘Good artists follow, Great artists innovate’. It is important to learn from the successes and failures of your design predecessors such that, first you analyze what they have been doing right and follow those trends (‘Good artists follow’) and second, you know what you can do more to correct it if it has gone wrong and innovate on those products in future (‘Great artists innovate’). By doing so, you’ll be able to see much more, and much further, into the field of design and technology.
With this article, I would like to express my gratitude to my mentors Dalpat Prajapati & Jemis for helping me become a good designer.
Special thanks to Surojit Mahto for helping me compose this article in a better form.
Thank you for reading. Constructive Feedback is always welcome. Please feel free to share your opinions on the topic in comments :)
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