Copy cat
Posted on January 01, 2003 @ 17:27 in Webdesign
Pirated Sites is a site that I occasionally visit. An interesting question: when is using another site's design as a template for your own site blatantly appropriating someone else's hard work and when have to tweaked and changed it around enough to be able to call it your own?
Stopdesign also had it's design 're-purposed' by another site (just like I found my design including all the notes I made in the stylesheet on another site) and Bowman's comments strike a certain chord with how I felt when I found out:
A site I designed and built by hand from scratch. Earned knowledge gained through experience and lots of trial and error. [...] I didn't realize the uniqueness of my collective design decisions until I saw them replicated verbatim in another setting.
Of course, I have benefitted greatly from picking apart other people's designs and reading through all the different tutorials and CSS based templates as well and looking at it that way, we all stand on someone else's shoulders. Personally I don't mind if you pick apart my design and copy a trick or two, because that's the way to learn and to do it, I think. That's the way I do it and I try to be conscientious about it and to leave references in the remarks in the source about where I got a good trick or how I arrived at a solution based on someone else's work.
It becomes quite another thing imho when you simply copy and paste and just change the content, rather than going through the process of really understanding what goes on in the code and making it your own. So maybe the 'rule' should be to create your own design, making a unique set of design decisions to paraphrase Bowman, while using, or rather building on the knowledge and expertise of others, preferably referencing it as you recreate a particular effect or trick you got someplace else.
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