[HN Gopher] Copying is the way design works
___________________________________________________________________
Copying is the way design works
Author : innerzeal
Score : 194 points
Date : 2024-07-22 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matthewstrom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matthewstrom.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| This is a great quote:
|
| > In the middle of Apple's case against Microsoft, Xerox sued
| Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the
| desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and
| questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates
| later reflected on these cases: _"we both had this rich neighbor
| named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and
| found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it."_
| manav wrote:
| Copying from Xerox, some irony there.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Adds layers of irony to their "Redmond, start your
| photocopiers" dig
| https://www.padawan.info/en/images/photocopiers.html
| freetinker wrote:
| I miss this flavor of advertising. It all feels too anodyne
| these days.
| karmakaze wrote:
| It's also a lesson that always seems to fail to be learned.
| Xerox had the capital to set up a research arm, then failed
| to convert on any ideas because they were too focused on
| their current cash-cow. They eventually transitioned to
| "document company" where a document wasn't only paper, but it
| was too little/late.
| wiz21c wrote:
| > I broke into his house
|
| Not fun at all. Microsoft is like Disney, they steal from
| others and trounce others for stealing from them.
|
| Absurd people.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Sad to see this _extremely_ historically accurate and
| relevant comment downvoted.
|
| And on the forum which should most know it to be true!
| zogrodea wrote:
| I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of
| Microsoft trouncing others?
|
| I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so
| long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public
| domain).
|
| I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm
| programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem"
| because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although
| that's a different problem.
|
| I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS,
| though, which is most likely a failure of my
| memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.
| turnsout wrote:
| This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and
| the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in
| exchange for $1M worth of pre-IPO Apple stock, which today
| would be worth [checks notes] more than that. There was no
| theft.
|
| Apple engineers got to see the Alto, not the Star (the
| screenshot in the article is wrong, the chronology is wrong).
| The visit was so fast that Apple engineers thought they saw
| realtime overlapping windows when they didn't. [0] So it's
| possible Xerox was inspired by Apple with the Star, not the
| other way around.
|
| Meanwhile, Bill Gates totally outs himself as someone who would
| steal shamelessly.
|
| [0]: https://folklore.org/On_Xerox%2C_Apple_and_Progress.html
| Hitton wrote:
| Meanwhile Steve Jobs: "We have always been shameless about
| stealing great ideas."
| iczero wrote:
| > There was no theft.
|
| I didn't know that touring somewhere meant you could copy all
| their designs. Was that explicitly stated?
| pulse7 wrote:
| Steve Jobs himself told what he saw at Xerox:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Beautifully written article. One of my first ideological shifts
| happened when Napster was released. Bits flowing freely without
| being bounded by rules of the physical world deeply changed me
| and while later I do understand artists need to get paid and make
| a living, piracy and the pirating community is still very close
| to my heart. The amount of innovation which comes out of that
| space, is tremendous. The fact that zuckerberg could create
| trillions of dollar on free projects such as php and apache is
| not cherished enough.
|
| I think we still haven't found a proper economy for the digital
| world. The fact that pirating game of thrones was a better option
| than waiting for it to be premiered in your region goes to show
| there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. If there
| wasn't piracy, free software, open source and american VC (the
| first few waves, not the last few), this industry wouldn't have
| grown at this pace.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| The "artists need to make a living" narrative against piracy is
| pure deception. Truth is that most artists want nothing more
| than for their messages to spread as widely as possible, as
| that is also the most naturally profitable path for them in the
| long term. It's only when managerial types get involved the
| need to turn a quick buck by denying the natural flow of
| information becomes a primary concern. So pirate away, knowing
| that nothing of value is lost.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I self-publish my books. The audience is decent, I publish
| shortened audiobook versions for free, but frankly, I like
| the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and
| no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market
| with them at my expense.
|
| It would have been natural, but also depressing.
| surfingdino wrote:
| I stopped self-publishing my books, because as soon as I
| offered PDFs to those who purchased my paper books the
| sales of printed copies tanked. Then nobody wanted to pay
| for PDFs and Amazon screwed my KDP sales (banned my book).
| The readers felt entitled to free copies and free
| consultation on the subject of the book. It's really
| depressing how entitled people feel to other people's
| creative output or knowledge.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That is why I publish freely the audio versions (which
| only consist of about half of the stories within each
| book), but not the PDFs.
| shagie wrote:
| > I like the fact that the paper books themselves are
| copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and
| flood the market with them at my expense.
|
| Amazon has a book piracy problem ( 219 points by tosh on
| July 8, 2022 | 120 comments )
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026663
| https://x.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976 (and via
| Threadreader -
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550930876183166976.html
| ) - also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210256 (
| 665 points by jmillikin on July 24, 2022 | 193 comments )
|
| Pirated books thrive on Amazon -- and authors say web giant
| ignores fraud -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 ( 87 points
| by vanilla-almond on April 30, 2023 | 79 comments )
| https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirated-books-thrive-on-
| amazon...
|
| Amazon caught selling counterfeits of publisher's computer
| books--again - https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/02/amazo...
|
| Having something that is paper doesn't mean that no one
| else can print them cheaply and flood the market. While it
| might not be at your _expense_ - it certainly isn 't
| something that is making you any money.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I don't self-publish on Amazon, though. I print my books
| in a local printing shop and sell them using my e-shop
| (Wordpress for blog, Woocommerce for e-shop).
| Terr_ wrote:
| > The "artists need to make a living" narrative against
| piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want
| [...]
|
| I'd like to offer a more moderate option--or perhaps just
| radical in a different direction.
|
| Artists _would_ like to make a living, and the "deception"
| comes from how that slogan is used to falsely present the
| powers-that-be as able, willing, and actively delivering on
| that goal.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists
| don't want to make a living. My point is that, too often,
| the "artists need to make a living too" narrative is used
| by the system that exploits artists.
| hluska wrote:
| Can you rephrase that without a double negative? I don't
| have a clue what you're trying to say and your
| explanation makes it worse.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Not parent poster, but I suspect the thesis can be
| rephrased like:
|
| "Artists _do_ want to make a living, however there 's a
| nuance when it comes to achieving that. Finding enough
| solid supporters requires such a wide dispersal of their
| content that any 'anti-piracy' measures are almost always
| counterproductive, at least when it comes to the
| interests of artists as opposed to middlemen."
| kmeisthax wrote:
| It's important to note _who_ is pushing the deception, here.
| Creative industry is composed of both labor (artists) and
| capital (publishers). I file artists under labor because
| their valuable economic resource is time. They make money
| when people pay them to make art. Unauthorized copying _has
| harms_ , but the primary effect is that artists have to
| expect to be paid money up-front, since the only way they get
| profit participation on the sale of copies is if there's a
| strictly enforced set of laws to grant a monopoly on copying.
| That being said, money up-front is still a very common way
| for artists to get paid, so "artists need to make a living"
| is a half-truth.
|
| Paying per-copy _and agreeing not to copy for some fixed
| period_ is more consumer friendly than, say, everyone pooling
| their money into a giant one-and-done Kickstarter and just
| trusting that the end result will be good. If your work can
| be published serially, then something like Patreon _might_
| work, but that 's impractical for a lot of larger projects.
| The consumer unfriendliness manifests in the form of risk:
| who is out the money if something turns out to _suck_ , or
| worse, doesn't even get made. The traditional "sell copies
| with a monopoly" model means that if I don't like a work, I
| just don't buy it. We have reviews to inform people if a
| thing is good or not, but you can't review a finished work
| based off the Kickstart campaign. This results in a market
| dominated by scams of varying degrees, customers who are
| hesitant to put money into campaigns that might not produce,
| and artists that can only really make the business model work
| if they have a lot of social capital and reputation to stake.
|
| I mentioned fancy capitalist words like "risk" and "market",
| so let's talk about the capitalist side of the business: the
| publishers. Or "managerial types", as it were. They do not
| make their money from selling the service of creating art,
| they make money from selling art that has already been made,
| which is capital. When Napster was telling people to stop
| paying for music and just steal it, the publishers shat their
| pants. An embarrassingly large part of the music business at
| the time was reissuing old acts on CD[0][1], and even new
| acts had to sell albums, which is why 90s listeners had to
| deal with a flood of albums with one good song and 10
| terrible ones.
|
| It's specifically the capitalist side of the business that
| got screwed over the hardest by Napster. What screwed over
| artists was Spotify, which made music profitable again for
| the capitalists by turning it into a subscription. A music
| Boomer[2] accurately summed this up as a faucet pouring water
| straight into a drain. This is the best way to devalue
| artists, because it doesn't matter what songs the artists
| make - just that the publishers control the flow of the
| songs.
|
| The Spotify mentality has percolated into basically every
| other form of media over the last decade. It's why you will
| own nothing and be 'happy', and why every publisher CEO has a
| boner for generative AI, even as their artists are screaming
| their heads off about being scraped. Publishers have
| nominally been stolen from as well, but they don't care,
| because the theft is in their benefit[3]. It's the exact
| opposite of the Napster situation. What matters is not what
| will benefit the artists, nor what the law says. What matters
| is what will make _them_ richer.
|
| [0] This is also why the SPARS code was a thing for a few
| years - to distinguish between new recordings made for CD and
| reissues riding the hype of digital music.
|
| [1] Metallica _also_ found themselves caught on the back
| foot, mainly because they found out Napster users were
| trading pre-release soundtracks they 'd made. Their reaction
| made them look like suits for a while, because Metallica had
| gotten popular through unlicensed copying, though I don't
| think this read was entirely fair.
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo?t=485
|
| [3] I don't think generative AI will replace real artists,
| but it doesn't matter so long as publishers believe it can.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > "Functionally and aesthetically, the chairs are identical."
|
| Listen dude, go ahead and buy the $145 Modway chair. It's so bad,
| it is $118 nowadays. It will literally fall apart under your ass.
| Read the reviews.
| breck wrote:
| Go further.
|
| If you model ideas mathematically, you will see that societies
| plagued with IPDD (https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html) will become
| extinct, because they prolong the lifespan of bad ideas, and
| those with intellectual freedom, where bad ideas rapidly evolve
| into good ideas, will rise to the top of the food chain. The
| equation is simple: ETA! (https://breckyunits.com/eta.html)
|
| Question whether we should even have a concept of "licenses"
| (hint: we shouldn't). Look up "freedom licenses", which "freed"
| African Americans used to have to carry around in the 1800's.
| Think about how future generations will look at us for having a
| concept of "licenses on ideas". Think about the natural
| progression of automatic licenses on ideas (copyright act of
| 1976), to breathing: there is no reason not to require "licenses"
| to breathe, given that you exhale carbon dioxide molecules just
| as you exhale "copyrighted" information.
| surfingdino wrote:
| I think you are conflating copyright with patents. Licenses and
| other forms of intellectual property protection exist so that
| those who control means of production and distribution pay
| those who have ideas, or produce creative output.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I agree they're different, and different still from
| trademarks, but the common thing is to conflate it all under
| "Intellectual Property", isn't it?
|
| I'm deeply suspicious of this conflation. I think it's done
| on purpose, in bad faith, for nefarious reasons.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post model
| the real world?
|
| I ask, because these intellectual property protections are
| intended to incentivize creation. If that incentive overwhelms
| these models of information sharing and testing frictions then
| the model is incomplete.
| breck wrote:
| > because these intellectual property protections are
| intended to incentivize creation
|
| Judge something not by what people say it does, but by what
| it actually does.
|
| > If that incentive overwhelms these models of information
| sharing and testing frictions then the model is incomplete.
|
| Agreed. But try as I might, I can't find any way
| theoretically or empirically to model copyrights and patents
| that show a positive impact on innovation.
|
| Nature's survival of the fittest already provides near
| infinite incentive to innovate.
|
| Now, I think patents and copyrights had a positive side-
| effect effect in the early days of the United States because
| it created a centralized library in the District of Columbia
| containing all of the latest information across the fledgling
| nation. But with the Internet, we don't even need that
| anymore. All the other parts of those laws are harmful and a
| drain on innovation.
|
| Look at what happened with Windows/Crowdstrike-ultimately
| another harm caused by closed source, under-evolved "IP
| protected" ideas. Ironically Microsoft calls Windows their
| "Intellectual Property" when collecting money, but when that
| IP harms people, suddenly it's not their property.
|
| > Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post
| model the real world?
|
| Depends on where you live. If you live in America, evidence
| is all around you. :)
|
| But here is some hard data, thousands of programming
| languages ranked by languages most used to build other
| languages (which gives an objective measure of idea quality):
|
| https://pldb.io/lists/explorer.html#columns=rank~name~id~app.
| ..
|
| Utterly dominated by open source langs. Closed source, IP
| ones are headed for extinction.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Why on earth would IP keep bad ideas around? You're free to
| make a better idea and let it compete in the market, since by
| being better it'd definitionally be different.
| iczero wrote:
| Let's say someone patents, idk, Client-Side Decoration (CSD).
| People like it, surely, because people use it. Unfortunately,
| there is drastically reduced space to innovate because nobody
| else can use that idea anymore. Expecting the patent holder
| to innovate has proven to be a bad assumption in part because
| IPR means they have no competition in that space anyways. The
| idea stays bad because nobody else can make it better.
| ljlolel wrote:
| I can make cheap, small-scale facsimiles, fangzhipin, to
| demonstrate some quality of the original. I can make exact
| replicas, pixel-perfect fuzhipin, to learn how the originals and
| their creators work. Or I can create shanzhai, unsolicited
| redesigns, commenting and riffing on the work of others. All
| these copies have an important role to play in the process of
| design.
|
| Whether you believe that it's worthwhile or worthless to copy,
| whether you think that copies are a valuable part of the design
| community or a scourge, you are using software, hardware,
| websites and apps that all owe their existence to copying.
|
| As long as there is design, there will be copying.
| fsckboy wrote:
| As long as there are new ideas, those without such ideas will
| copy them
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| But that take is too narrow - many of the 'great' painters
| had extensive training in the work of previous masters,
| frequently copying their works repeatedly in order to develop
| technique and more deeply engage with what came before. After
| developing that base skill and understanding, they had a
| better toolset to express their own originality.
| burnished wrote:
| I see that you've copied every word you used here, not very
| original of you
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| As long as there are ideas, there will be people who claim
| their "new ideas" have absolutely nothing in them derived
| from any previous ideas. Such people then scorn others who do
| not help them maintain the same fiction, and who instead dare
| to acknowledge that _everything_ builds on what came before.
| surfingdino wrote:
| The author got lost in his argumentation. He starts with design,
| but goes off into the lands of open source, patents, and art.
| It's not a well-written or researched article. Design is not
| software development is not art.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you're a
| designer, or even if you're just interested in design, you
| probably feel the need to be original, too.
|
| I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that
| thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly
| original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want
| to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist
| instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is
| communicate the best solution to a problem, given the
| requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality
| is subordinate to that at best.
| burningChrome wrote:
| This.
|
| I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company
| that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their
| designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do
| that, it seemed easy.
|
| The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites,
| with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool
| navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea
| that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I
| thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and
| whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with
| whatever uber cool thing I showed them.
|
| Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't
| want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to
| find information about their work and contact them to hire
| them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web
| designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare
| stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy
| piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to
| solve and want you to solve them for them.
|
| I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to
| learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to
| their problems.
| ozim wrote:
| It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they
| have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to
| be edgy or whatever... most of people pay for having cookie
| cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good
| experience and they don't want to be surprised on EDM event -
| well there are big names that can do whatever they want of
| course but that is different expectation.
|
| The same with software devs that they think, it must be
| "framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there
| for 20 years" - well no if it is crud app most likely it will
| be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)
| m12k wrote:
| Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to
| work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market
| leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the
| other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours.
| So to the extent that originality means diverging from those
| expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing
| your users a disservice, by not letting them leverage the
| expectations and muscle memory they already have. Building on
| paradigms that others have established as the norm means
| meeting users where they are.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| As a concrete example, the idea of a mouse was once
| counterintuitive to users because they'd never seen one
| before.
|
| Windows included Solitaire with the OS in part to introduce
| ideas like "click" or "click and drag" to users that were
| unfamiliar with GUIs, by linking them to _physical_
| concepts users did understand ( "oh, I have a physical
| card, I can grab it and move it around, that makes
| sense!").
| indiv0 wrote:
| Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- "Everything is
| a Remix" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas
| albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level --
| the article could be called a remix of the video.
|
| The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking
| patents/IP law as anti-creative.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
| amelius wrote:
| Yes and that Disney copied old fairy tales and made them their
| own.
| js2 wrote:
| For a visual form of the same argument, but more about music and
| film, see everything is a remix:
|
| https://www.everythingisaremix.info/
|
| It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned any
| discussion:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=everything+is+a+remix
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It's easier to discuss a text, to quote from it, to comment on
| it -- to remix it, you might say.
| pembrook wrote:
| Copying isn't just how design works, it's how everything works.
| Humans are imitation machines.
|
| We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating
| stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas
| outside of base impulses.
|
| Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to
| any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all
| the breakthroughs are BS media narratives. Most if not all steps
| forward in any field have hundreds of people clawing at similar
| ideas concurrently.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| This is why not much changed for 10s of thousands of years
| until writing was invented, and accelerated when a valid method
| of iteration (science) was instituted.
| infoseek12 wrote:
| An interesting article about Asian perspectives on copying
| (https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just...)
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Re: The copied terracottas
|
| Originality is overrated in art, painting restoration usually
| entails repainting large sections of the original. The image and
| the ideas far transcends the "original" which is usually reserved
| for bragging rights for uber rich collectors. The best art is the
| art you get to enjoy everyday.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You sorta want to use affordance, when Apple creates a new type
| of UI, it's usually because the introduced new tech. Like recent
| Samsung copy cat AirPods, they cannot invent a new UI because
| they are not the innovators, so they need to borrow affordances
| from Apple.
|
| On why they copy the shape and size, that is the part where you
| can be more artistic, and it seems they have no taste.
|
| (Affordance meaning using what people already is familiar with so
| they don't have to relearn an interface)
| esalman wrote:
| A lot of the UI features and associated tech that apple
| introduced in iPhone and iPad last few years lagged Android by
| a few iterations. What gives?
| eddyzh wrote:
| Insightful perspective.
|
| Maybe interesting to point out from what year it is. It looks
| like 2020.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Yep, the opengraph published_time is (taken from the source
| code of the page):
|
| Wed Oct 28 2020 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
|
| Article has been submitted twice, but never gained any traction
| (no comments, very few votes):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093794
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925039
| eduction wrote:
| Steve Jobs didn't just waltz into Xerox PARC and steal a glimpse
| at the Alto. That visit was heavily lawyered and PARC got Apple
| shares as compensation. To summarize this as "stealing" is just
| incorrect. Lazy work.
| rogerclark wrote:
| Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen,
| however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than
| Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior.
|
| Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is.
| Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design
| works, copying only gets you so far.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was
| better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly
| side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push
| the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology
| which I believe is what the article is pointing out.
| rogerclark wrote:
| "Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a
| better version of Mario."
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Resolved = tried, wished
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Millennial here - I played this as a teenager on our ancient-
| for-the-time family PC.
| zogrodea wrote:
| Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about
| how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the
| famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us
| being shocked.
|
| "Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is
| altogether 'original', that is to say, purely his own work and
| not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must
| be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing
| them.
|
| It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they
| find that Shakespeare's plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy
| hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of
| plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch,
| or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into
| his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of
| Beethoven's C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of
| Mozart's G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the
| habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude
| Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have
| thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."
|
| I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it
| hard to take a single side.
| jjcm wrote:
| One of the mistakes I made as a young designer was pushing back
| against trends and fads. My opinion at the time was that trends
| that weren't thought out from a position of UX principles were an
| anti-pattern to follow. As I matured more as a designer, I now
| think nearly the opposite - not following trends is an anti-
| pattern, since that's what your users will be used to.
|
| Pull down to refresh is a great example of this. Not visible or
| discoverable at all, but was all the hype when Tweetie first
| released it. On paper it's an anti-pattern, but now it's so
| ingrained as a trend and pattern that it became expected, and is
| now muscle memory for many users.
|
| The same goes with flat buttons - I used to be quite opposed to
| them since there was no visual elevation off the page designating
| it as a button. Now if you create a button with a bevel, users
| will think it's an ad, not part of the page itself.
|
| Copying leads to harmony in the wider ecosystem, and it creates a
| defined agreement on what things are are how they work. It's an
| important part of the user experience.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| There's been recent discussions on TV news about 'dupe' specific
| sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the
| popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However,
| the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In
| woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan,
| but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler
| would look at a shoe and know how to make it for their customer.
| A tailor can change a collar or stitch to match what anyone
| wants.There was no demand that every worker have a unique design
| - everyone understood it was made to order. When it becomes
| possible to scale a design to worldwide sales, then the claims of
| uniqueness seem to us to become more important - but should they?
| vizzier wrote:
| Counterpoint to that though, guilds existed as a different form
| of control for many hundreds or thousands of years. Instead of
| controlling what people can make, just control who can make it.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| Tom Ford commented on the issue of counterfeit and "knock off"
| products in the fashion industry, he said after some research
| (I assume by him/his company) they found that the people buying
| the cheap counterfeit products weren't their customers anyway,
| and so they weren't losing anything.
| analog31 wrote:
| "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -- Igor Stravinsky
|
| (Probably stolen)
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