On copying

Designers have a complicated relationship with copying. The line between influence, homage, and theft is not as clear as the design press tends to suggest. This is a longer post about why I think most of the agonising is misplaced, and where I think it should sit instead.

Most good design work is in conversation with other design work. The Swiss grid is borrowed every time anyone uses Helvetica. The asymmetric layouts in modern editorial design are borrowed almost wholesale from Tschichold and the New Typography crowd. The minimalist single-colour book covers that magazines keep declaring “trends” are borrowed from Penguin’s Marber grid, which was itself borrowed. None of this is a secret. None of it is theft.

The trouble starts when the borrowing is silent.

A few rough rules I have settled on, after enough years of this.

If you are influenced by a specific living designer, mention them when you talk about the work. Send them a note when the work goes live, with a link, and a short explanation of the influence. They will almost always appreciate it. Most of the bitterness in design about being copied is not about the copying. It is about being copied silently.

If you are influenced by a specific dead designer, or by a movement, name it in the case study. Saying “this work is in conversation with the Polish poster school” makes the work better and not worse. It situates the piece. It signals to the audience that you know what you are doing. It avoids the slightly embarrassing situation of someone else recognising the influence and assuming you did not.

If you are influenced by something so widely repeated that it has no clear single source, Swiss grids, the modernist book cover, Ikko Tanaka’s posters, no attribution is needed. These are part of the language of the field. Speaking them is not theft.

If you are knowingly reproducing something close to a specific recent commercial brand identity, do not. This is not influence. This is the bit the design press is right about.

The book I keep coming back to on this is Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. It is short, clear, and ages well. Frank Chimero’s older essay What Screens Want is unrelated to the topic but worth a read for the same reason. Both are arguments for taking the broader history of your field seriously, and for not pretending you arrived at your work without any of it.

Maria Popova’s longer treatment is in the same neighbourhood. So is Jim Jarmusch’s “nothing is original” note, which has been quoted often enough that you have probably already read it. The companion piece on case studies that age well covers the same argument applied to writing about your own work.

The short version: pay your debts in public.