Welcome Stranger, I hope you have an amazing day! Grab something to drink or eat and let us dive into today’s episode.

The trend

Lately, there’s been a trend, well it’s not lately… this has been happening for a long time but due to the impact of social media and everyone sharing work. This has become more clear and more frequent.

Today I woke up and went to Twitter to post an update on some things we are working on. After I did, I saw a post from a guy I follow who does cool s*!t calling someone out.

The guy apologised eventually but this all could have been avoided… easily.

Let’s call the guy stealing Bob and the one calling him out Adam. Unfortunately, I can’t share the work, since the post has been deleted since. Probably due to all the backlash .

Bob posted a series of web design iterations for a landing page, all kinds of 1:1 to the website Adam worked on. Naturally, Adam called out Bob for stealing his work. The agency he works for left a sarcastic comment about a 15k invoice. Since… it’s their work.

So where is the line? How can Bob not steal and at the same time create stunning designs? None of this would have happened, if Bob would write “Inspired by Adam”.

You see, giving credit when credit is due shouldn't be hard. This only hurts Bob, there’s no going out of this rabbit hole. Since there’s no credit given. The design is clearly a rip off the website.

Even if Bob says in the comments

“Thanks for mentioning this, the client pushed it even tho I told him it’s similar to your work”

That doesn’t fix anything, the damage is done, and it’s not on Adam’s reputation.

Not just design

This does not happen only in the design circles. Peter Tarka had this happen to him a couple of weeks ago on a way bigger scale. Yes, I’m mentioning Peter, since this got a ton of attention.

So one day Peter woke up and saw his work between the Adobe assets.

Since he’s not a small fish in the pond, and charges hefty sums for his work. He called them out. Because this is again… stealing and reselling the assets to tens of thousands of people.

In the end, it went into private mail and who knows if it got solved. I doubt it since we know Adobe is training their s*!t on our work.

The thing is, it’s not okay if an individual does it, nor it’s’ okay for multibillion company. These things shouldn’t happen. There is no excuse for them and yes it’s a theft.

Where is the line?

Look… it’s pretty hard to come up with something unique these days. It is and I get it. the chances are, that if you, my fellow stranger, created something for a project, portfolio, or something else.

The chances are that it already exists, that someone’s done it, and that it might be very similar. We live in a world with AI and social media. People share their work all the time, so naturally, if a thing is good and hits a note. It gets stuck in our minds. We save it for later to try to have a shot at this piece of art.

But sometimes, people are too lazy to think and work on the design. Slapping random things and copying rather than treating it more as an opportunity to explore the style. Let’s have a look at an example.

The image above is my work. It’s a monochrome website with a showcase of a product on the right side.

Before the design phase, I went on the hunt for inspiration. Found 2 to 4 designs I liked, not necessarily the same concept. For example, I had a big typography layout I liked, a color scheme I liked, a product tease I liked, and so on…

For the inspiration, I didn’t look at the design as a whole, but rather as elements. That might or might not fit. Then I combined them all into something unique, no stealing. Tweaking copy, tweaking colors, different layouts, different cards. In the end, 90–95% of the things are different.

The 5–10% can be like a text effect, or a background effect idea, that someone did, but you have to change it again! Not that you go and steal some pattern someone did on a background and slap it in there.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, once you do enough landing pages, there is hardly any creativity in it. You can go to sites for inspiration.

Pick 2–3 out, assemble the components, and call it a day. Or just stick with one design layout you’ve perfected and be unique in that.

(Section hero header from Patrick)

The image above is the inspiration I took from Patrick. I’ve already had some saved 3D images that I wanted to recreate god rays but what he did was wonderful. So I wanted to try that.

See I took the idea, tried different layout god rays, and changed the color to tint blue. That’s it. That’s all I took from that design. I iterated on it, combined different things into something “unique” if we can call it that…

Why is this happening?

Why is it so hard to change the design? Why is it so hard to write inspired by “X”

There is more than one answer to these. One of them I’d say is ego-boosting.

Seeing how fast some people progress can be motivating, but also daunting. It can make someone work even harder, or break someone to give up. So Why would you need to tag someone, that you stole his work, when it might not even be discovered? Why say out loud, it’s not my idea!”

When you can simply take all the credit for yourself, get more likes, and more followers. Potentially more clients. And boost your ego a little bit. Then write how much money you make from these and how they take you little to no less time and done.

But how’s your sleep? How does it feel? What does it say about you as a person?

This is why it’s happening, people want artificial attention and likes so they can feel good. But do they?

Design good s*!t

There’s been a time when I was creating things that were trendy, or getting tons of likes. A great example is the “clay” look in 3D. It’s the simplest thing, it takes one value to achieve this and everyone loves it.

But in the end, the work got boring, so I stopped.

“When you don’t like what you’re creating just stop”

Doing something that receives tons of attention and likes, but at the same time, eats you alive, because you no longer enjoy creating it. Is bad. It’s bad for you and your creative self.

I see this all over social media. People like and share work, that’s s!*t. Saying how awesome that stuff is! How they love it!

People sharing invoices with thousands of dollars, how that took them 30 minutes to do.

But then the work looks like this.

Stop following people without checking their work, and hold them to a higher standard. Surround yourself with great designers, that don’t need this ego-boosting stuff. And the most important thing of all, they don’t steal.

I myself follow a lot of people on socials. For design, there are only 3 to 5 people I check to see what cool stuff they did.

So in the end I started doing what I liked, exploring different styles and enjoying the work. Sure I don’t get as many likes or follows. That will come with time, the right people with the same taste, will find you. With time.

That’s it for today, as always I thank you for your time reading this story and wish you a beautiful day!

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