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  • Hacker News
  • The key is stealing from multiple sources. Grab 3+ different sites that you really love and extract the elements that really resonate from each and meld them together into your own synthesis. Copying wholesale and tweaking a couple of things is lame IMO. That being said, pixel-perfect copywork is a fantastic exercise for improving your design skills.
    by dinkleberg
  • I remember working for a somewhat careless manager.. he just pointed at the chrome web dev store and said 'make it look like this'. I could have just copied everything wholesale but I actually handcrafted all the css, borrowing but generally using my own HTML structure, and js. The final result impressed even me. It made me feel.. if I worked on a team with real designers I could create something I would be proud of.
    by darepublic
  • I've gone through my own cycle of this as a musician. Early in my music experience I was always obsessed with originality, and wouldn't learn a lot of existing pieces. At the stage I'm at now, I find great value in learning great songs and understanding why they work.

    There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.

    by pseudosavant
  • This is the way
    by RobRivera
  • It's taken me reaching my fifties and entering an entirely new career to realise this. That arrogance and ambition of youth, the hard-line unwillingness to compromise and study other people's work really held me back!
    by klondike_klive
  • I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.
    by emaro
  • I thought the same at first, but they are copying somebody's old and retired design, ie the other company doesn't use that design anymore.
    by carlosjobim
  • Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together.

    As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?

    The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.

    by libria
  • I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg

    Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/

    If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.

    https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html

    I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.

    by sillysaurusx
  • This isn't stealing in the "good artists copy, great artists steal" sense. This is just straight copying/plagiarism.

    To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."

    by rglover
  • The original idea probably came from T.S. Eliot who said "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Imitation is surface level, but stealing here means to take inspiration and make it your own, transformation.
    by doginasuit
  • Isn't the cost of this mimicry originality? Also, there may be a "cover up" and a weight to the conscience in that non-attribution too.

    It's sort of like the whole idea of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" but I've always thought, "why would you want your enemies close?" Would that involve deception? Do the enemies start off as friends until they become close and then there's a switch to loving the devil?

    I saw a t-shirt once: "they can steal your style but not your originality." Gemini agreed. https://share.gemini.google/gA5aqbmA9AwO Gemini would know all about that. Gemini isn't the only one - the "creative fields" can be anything but. Checkout my page '2X' for ex_samples : https://future-secured.com/39599

    by adrianwaj
  • In a marketplace, this is theft. (Which, given this example is of a website for a for-profit product, seems appropriate.) In a community it's tradition. Building on traditions in a community (aka great artists steal) is different than trying to get yours in a marketplace. Art and community traditions aren't a competition until they are dragged into the marketplace.
    by erikschoster
  • My favorite quote that expresses this idea is from Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47: “Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field.”
    by cjcenizal
  • (It feels very grumpy-old-man to complain about "low effort", but I think it's more culturally relevant than ever before...)

    ... not investigating your field is a massive low effort failure mode. You don't have to know your field, but you have to investigate it, appreciate it, draw upon it... even, or perhaps especially, if you're standing in opposition to it.

    (This is also why "first principles" twits like Elon are so annoying...)

    by jdub
  • there is negative stealing or avoiding mistakes done by others. as propounded by Warren Buffet and others. and epitomized by philosophy of being less wrong.
    by worldthruword
  • And then, if you are great, you will steal not from one thing but from everything
    by conartist6
  • In a similar vein, one of my favorite HN comments in the context of the modernist movement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27243252
    by pnexk
  • A good example of why this is true I see in my bubble is in Indie tabletop RPGs. Fairly regularly if you follow indie rpg websites and forums, you get the following "I am sick of how Dungeons and Dragons does X so I made a new system". They will then proceed to describe Dungeons and Dragons but with some half-baked idea that is already done in some other game. So you might say "Hey this is already done in Traveller". But the people who have extremely little exposure to the field, and have only ever played one game (D&D typically) ends up re-exploring the field with "new ideas" that have existed for decades and have already been iterated upon.
    by ecshafer
  • Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work.

    If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work.

    It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters.

    This seems like the web design version of this.

    by dghlsakjg
  • This was my first thought as well. Hunter S. Thompson used to copy Hemingway by hand to internalize his cadence.
    by wnmurphy
  • This also works in drawing and painting. One of my painting teachers used to admonish us: "copy, copy, copy".
    by egl2020
  • I too wanted to make this point. In art and designing, copying is how you learn and how you kick start your creativity and innovativeness.
    by thisislife2
  • i have a vague memory of hunter s thompson talking about sitting down and typing out the great gatsby to see how it would feel to write a great american novel
    by pjm331
  • Obligatory link to a relevant Jorge Luis Borges story: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (about an author who copied Don Quixote word for word)

    https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...

    by patrickscoleman
  • Jazz musicians also copy each other's solos for learning and practice purposes, but they would never actually perform more than a couple well placed quotes or licks from another player.
    by adamddev1
  • A bit tough to say this, but transformers are trained the same way.
    by dchftcs
  • Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.
    by fenomas
  • Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs? I think the line is pretty clear here. I remember the old Dan Mall's article on this topic which is much more inspirational (and "correct"): https://medium.com/@danielmall/stealing-your-way-to-original...
    by agilek
  • Do you not believe that the design of the "stolen" landing page was not itself 97% stolen from marketing landing pages that came before it?

    It's unusual seeing the process stated so bluntly, but for something as cookie-cutter as a company homepage this has been how web designers have done things for decades. Or, at the very least, it's how the craft is learned.

    by BHSPitMonkey