There is a well known article by designer Cameron Moll called Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal in which he encourages designers to not reinvent the wheel with each design. It is good advice, but if you stop reading the article at the title you are bound to get yourself into trouble. He ends the article with the warning:

This article wouldn’t be complete without a warning to be careful when copying well-known sources. If I were to summarize this warning in one sentence, this would be my golden verbiage: copy the inspiration, not the outcome.

A few days ago Eric Stoller posted a comparison of Virginia Tech’s homepage and Oregon State University’s College of Engineering on his blog. He noted the obvious similarity between the two designs (I won’t repeat it here, he does a great job of breaking it down). Well according to his source the copying is confirmed. This is embarrassing for all parties involved.

So how do you avoid this in your own designs or on sites you manage? Here is my advice:

1. Use more than one site for inspiration. If you rely on one site for all of your ideas you are bound to slip too far down the copying slope. You may not even realize it until it’s to too late.
2. Limit your inspiration from any one site/page to portions of the site/page. Cameron Moll calls this “Nodes of Inspiration” in a follow-up article on design inspiration.
3. If you are hiring someone, contract your designs to people/companies that will either know better or that you can trust not to blatantly copy. Plagiarism is usually an amateur mistake or the practice of an unethical person/company, so think twice before you hire. Cheap or free design work can sometimes be very costly.

Now go get some design inspiration. Here are a few of my recent favorites in the gallery:

• George Mason University – Think. Learn. Succeed
• Biola University – Student Life
• University of Notre Dame – Preserving the Traditions – Notre Dame Stadium

If you have any advice or lessons learned on the topic, please leave a comment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.