How do designers steal? Of course, this is not copying other people's designs, but learning from them. Perhaps the first reaction of many designers when they hear this view is, let me plagiarize, no, I am a designer to be original, plagiarism will have copyright risk, too low and so on! Picasso once said: Good artists copy, great artists steal. Sharing some experiences and methods in my work today can help me find some inspiration when my design is not inspired.

Bad example

Apple released the design of the iPhoneX this year, and adopted a full-screen design. Qi Liuhai at the top has been spit out, but the real reason why Apple has Qi Liuhai is that the sensor needed for the Face ID contained in it cannot be replaced by other better methods, so it is for the compromise design of functions.

This is a variety of Android flagship machine released by other companies at MWC20 18. Many domestic mobile phone companies, including them, followed this trend and decided to adopt the same design. Even many big factories blindly follow suit. If it is really because the top is equipped with a Face ID like Apple, it is understandable, but it is not. They designed it just to replicate. Why not make it beautiful? Like Xiaomi, they have some ideas of their own.

Maybe these companies have many business strategies, we don't know, but this kind of blind copying is actually not desirable.

This is Apple's face recognition expression, which contains many first-class technologies.

This is the new product effect of a company's press conference. It can be seen that it is also copying Apple's technology and ideas. There is no essential difference between the two. The above cases can only be copied at most! Instead of stealing, then what is stealing and how to steal it?

Good case

Japanese designers can see the smooth mouths of birds, which can help them fly faster in the air and reduce air resistance. Japanese designers used this function and design for reference to create a bullet high-speed train design with faster speed and less noise.

From the works of famous foreign fashion designers, we can see that the works of these fashion masters did not copy the format of big names, but made small changes on the basis of traditional fashion designers, but crossed the border and sought inspiration from nature and various traditional embroidery, including clouds in the sky and jellyfish at the bottom of the sea. This is what Picasso called stealing.

A group of cake works, inspired by natural architecture, give cakes a different aesthetic feeling.

Design of seat imitating swing.

The design of wooden pile handbag is a design technique that designers apply the whole or part of a bionic object to the appearance of the product after processing, which makes people have some relevant associations. So as to bring people the emotional needs of returning to nature.

Originated from designer Dae-hoo Kim, this volcanic humidifier is the winner of 20 13 IDEA Design Award. The main feature is that the shape is similar to a volcano, and the water is poured directly from the top. When working, the water vapor is also ejected from the same port, which has a weak lighting effect (the lighting effect is also standard for humidifiers now). It really looks like a volcano.

So stealing doesn't mean copying and pasting, copying, but thinking about combination on the shoulders of giants. Don't blindly imitate design, you need to understand the reasons behind success, and then think about how we can improve it when designing.

How to do it in the UI?

As we said before, the difference between plagiarism and stealing seems to have nothing to do with UI design, but in fact, UI is also interlinked. I don't know if you have used it for reference in the design process, but all kinds of styles are very confusing. Just like the picture above, a robot cat suddenly appeared in the Transformers cartoon. This design is very inappropriate. Sometimes I think the buttons on this interface look good, and sometimes I think the color of that interface looks good and copy it, resulting in our interface being totally different. So we ...

Steal only one point

A good UI work has several things in common: conceptual creativity, color style and interactive layout form, so when looking for some good references, we should try to refer to only one point of this design as inspiration. Too many points will lead to plagiarism, because we only learn from one point, so there are still many places that we need to create ourselves, so we have our own ideas in them.

disguised replacement of concept

Paul Flavius Nechita's design works, his conceptual creativity is particularly good, it is the design of a bank card, and the information on the card can be well input into the user information.

Designer Artem Borodynya is designing the idea of filling out a bank card. He studied the design works of Paul Flaviu Nechita, extracted the innovation of cards and inputs, and redesigned them according to their business characteristics. This is a very successful case of drawing inspiration from others to your own project.

Similarly, this is an original design, a very cool dashboard design, and the creative concept has a particularly good texture, which is well expressed by visual elements through good and complicated vehicle information.

Based on the original work, Marioimi493 rearranged the layout according to the original design concept, and the new work is also excellent. Their ideas are very similar, but they are all good works.

One of ElenaCrnkovi's smart designs is cool. It can know the weather and personal information of the day well in the mirror, which is very creative.

In addition, inspired by this mirror, the designer created a scene in the gym, and users can know their current physical state well through the gym mirror.

SlavaKornilov, a web work design, actually uses elegant fonts and circles, and combines creativity very well.

Based on the re-creation of this circular idea, other designers can see that they all copied the design of the original circular large font magazine, but at the same time they have their own distinctive characteristics.

Steal color texture

Color and style are very important elements in design, because when we look at the interface, it is color and texture that are most easily attracted.

The works of outstanding Indonesian designers have obvious style features and unique color matching and texture.

Designer Ghani Pradita learned color matching and texture on the basis of the original work, re-applied it to the project, created illustrations in this style, and modified color matching at the same time.

EePublic is a graphic style of a group of characters. The characters have no facial features, bright colors and distinctive lines.

Andrii Bezvershenko also studied the color matching of the original work and the design style of people without facial features, which continued particularly well.

One of Hurley's web designs uses the texture of vegetables and is very color-matched. The layout of the whole page is very harmonious and elegant.

Michal Kulesza learned the design concept of the original, and applied this design concept to his own project well, surpassing the original.

Steal layout

Layout and interaction are habits closely related to usability and functionality in the interface. Layout includes the layout of some functional modules, content layout and interactive operation. How to learn from good cases and layouts can help us do better in the project.

The designer designed this attractive formula pendant.

On this basis, Andy incorporates the elements of environmental protection, and the interface image processing is more reasonable.

Paul Flavius Nechita designed the layout of his personal page, and several large digital fonts set off the layout of this page.

Andre Veriku optimized the screen area in the large format layout and stole the essence of the original work very well.

Soundcloud is a good music software, especially when playing music, the effect is very smooth and the interactive experience is great.

Anthony Tipay learned this form of layout and interaction, re-combined his own product characteristics and new layout forms, and formed a new design style.

abstract

Do you remember the sentence I quoted at the beginning of the article? Picasso once said: Good artists copy, great artists steal. I want to make some adjustments on this basis: bad artists copy and great artists steal.

When we see some excellent designs and are inspired, we should have the courage to steal them and not be afraid of being labeled as imitators. Any good innovation and design must stand on the shoulders of giants, but we must pay attention to proportion. If you take too many elements as reference, it is plagiarism, so you must grasp the rules I mentioned earlier.