Rules for Stealing Someone Else's Work.

Just the other day, Herman and I were having a conversation about the role of influence in design (it was a good conversation). I know that it's a necessary part of the creative process for me. I enjoy looking at what other designers, especially ones I admire, are doing, how they're doing it, etc.

That being said, I've never outright stole someone else's design. That's just wrong. And lazy. And stupid. Really.

This whole thing wouldn't be noteworthy, except that I walked into my Type II class today, and saw that someone had stole a design of mine. Yeah. How do I know she stole it? Simple: we had Type I together. And the design that she stole was one that I had made for that class...that we had together.

Now, it's not a great design, but my professor liked it, and I worked really hard on it (that's it below. It's a hand painted poster - 34" x 50"), and quite frankly, I liked it. I also know that I'm probably not the first person to ever execute this idea, and I wouldn't have minded if this girl was like, "wow. Good idea. How can rework it and use it as an influence?"

I'm actually not angry about it, more, well, curious really.

For one thing: We're in Type II together. Did she not think that I would notice?

Secondly, she didn't even try to hide it. For this project, we're each given a typeface to study and design a page for. Her typeface is Didot, which is very similar to Bodoni. But instead of choosing a different letter, or even tilting it differently, or god forbid, placing it differently on the page - it looks just like mine. Except that it says "didot" at the top instead of "bodoni".

Which made me think that there should be some rules about stealing other peoples work:

Rule #1. Make sure you don't have a class with the person whose work you're stealing. It will just make them judge you.

Rule #2. Just don't! Because it's wrong. And lazy. And stupid. And it will just make them judge you.

That's all.