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As designers we may consider ourselves brilliant visual composers and creators of web masterpieces. The truth is, we have all at one time or another blatantly copied someone else’s design. There is actually a perfectly clear explanation for this. The three reasons web designers copy another’s web design are (1) design immaturity, (2) design popularity, and (3) design pressure. Designers who are just starting out in the world of web design suffer from design immaturity. It’s natural. When we are just starting out, we have the driving need to impress our managers or clients. When searching for inspiration on the web, we usually end up ripping off someone else’s design. We don’t yet know how to properly find inspiration on the web, so we resort to mimicry. Hopefully, with time, we all grow out of this phase. The other two reasons for copying another’s design will remain with us for the rest of our design careers. Design popularity refers popular sites that we think look great, so we copy them. We feel design pressure when our client or manager tells us what to design, and because we don’t know how to do that, we end up copying someone else’s rendition. If you have no new ideas with no inspiration to draw from, taking on new design projects can be daunting. That’s when it becomes easy to go find a popular website and copy it in order to get a project off the ground. The temptation to copy is a result of something all web designers feel from time to time: doubt. When you’ve hit a brick wall and can’t think of something brilliant to do with this next design project, you may begin to consider yourself a failure and question your worth as a designer. This is when most designers get the itch of copy. On the other hand, some designers have brilliant ideas, but because of management or client pressure, our hands are tied. We are forced to copy other sites because that’s what the client wants. Some clients are willing to work with your unique ideas, while others demand straight up copies. Designers and clients be warned: there are grave consequences to copying another’s design. Picasso said that a bad artist copies and a great artist steals. Such is true of web designers in most cases. However, a designer’s greatness is also determined by originality. A design’s success should not be based on its popularity or how it is received by a mainstream audience. A great designer knows what is best for the project, despite what others may tell him. Unfortunately, completely custom web design is a luxury few designers get to experience due to pressure from management and clients. We may never know why the designs we copy are so popular. The designers of those websites did what they did for a reason – a reason we may never know. For all we know, those designers copied their designs from someone else. The point is, when you copy, you don’t learn anything. You don’t learn why this gradient works best here, or why this drop shadow should be light instead of heavy. Copying only hurts the designer. One of the most valuable talents a web designer has is knowing when and why a certain design element works. You can’t learn this through copying, only through criticism, evaluation, experimentation and testing.
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