Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Designing’

Great Designers Steal?

July 6th, 2009 No comments

You often hear designers say, “Good designers copy. Great designers steal.”

Well, anyone who says this is one of three types of designers:

One who copies, one who steals or one who admits that not copying and stealing is hard but still tries not to anyway.

For some reason, a lot of web designers believe that there’s nothing truly unique left to create and that there is no such thing as originality.

I disagree, or at least I don’t want to accept that notion. You shouldn’t either.

SG_500x80_200903

Designers who copy

These people are at the bottom of the design pyramid, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You have to start somewhere.

Designers who copy are novices who haven’t yet grasped what makes a great design great, and so they imitate.

They frequent web galleries, pick a site they like and find a way to recreate and adapt it to the project at hand. This is how anyone learns anything. In fact, this is how we learn to, among other things, walk and talk as babies. We imitate to build a foundation of experience.

My very first website was a fan site for the anime Dragon Ball Z, which I loved as a kid. In the process of creating this site, I taught myself HTML by copying the code from another Dragon Ball Z site that I liked.

I literally copied and pasted all of the code, but then I went through it line by line, learning what each tag did. By the time I designed my next site, I was able not only to understand code but to create my own code from scratch.

Designers who steal

These are, of course, the people who say, “Good designers copy. Great designers steal.” Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch once said:

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery; celebrate it if you feel like it.”

This sums up these burglars well. Once a designer has copied another’s design and feel they have a grasp of what makes a great design great, their natural inclination is to go and create their own great and unique design.

But they soon discover that doing that is not as easy as the other designer made it seem. They learn that the dirty secret of many great designers is that they steal.

In design, to steal is to take inspiration from other people’s work. Designers who steal may frequent online design galleries, like designers who copy, but they know how to hide their sources.

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” —Albert Einstein


They take only pieces of sites or just the overall concept or theme of something. In 2003, designer Cameron Moll wrote an article titled  “Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal” in which he shows the source of a logo he created.

web_images2

Moll explains:

“The chances of someone else having used this particular piece of clip art were very slim. And the chances of the intended audience — or anyone else, for that matter — being familiar with such a piece were even slimmer. Translation? A perfect source for stealing.”

Designers who try not to copy or steal

It’s a fact that we can’t help but be influenced by our surroundings. Designers steal all the time without realizing it.

A designer may look at the curvy lines of Moll’s logo above and months later may create a logo very similar to it without actually recalling where they got the idea from.

Designers in this category are aware of this habit. They know that creating something truly unique is almost impossible, but they try anyway.

To try, they may start by looking at online print galleries, instead of web galleries. They may also begin looking at package design, architecture, photography, nature—anything but web design—in an attempt to be authentically inspired rather than simply steal.

They look not just for design that works but rather for ways to make designs better.

After walking around a park in search of inspiration for a blog on nature, a designer may find him or herself using images of grass and soil to dress up the footer of the site to look like ground. They might add some birds to the header.

Or, after sitting on a bench and noticing the relationship between foreground and background, they might play around with the user’s sense of perception.

The further a designer who seeks inspiration moves away from web design, the more likely their designs will turn out truly original.

To sum up…

The pursuit of originality on the web is not a lost cause. The web industry is still young, and some things have yet to be attempted.

Once you understand the basics of design, try to think outside the box, and try new and different things. Be atypical and unique. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to design from the heart. But keep this in mind:

“Things which are different in order to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.” —Dieter Rams

In our striving to be unique and original, trying different things for their own sake is okay because they could potentially lead to better things. It’s a lot like throwing darts at a target blindfolded. You may never hit the target, but you just might learn something in the process. But do try hard to make something better than just different.

Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat and the center of the universe. Not too long ago, either, designers used the <blink> tag and used tables to build websites.

Theories and conventions are always being questioned, challenged and broken, and they should. If you believe a better way is possible, you will often find your way to it.

“The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.” —Marty Neumeier

15 Excellent Logo Design Tutorials Using Illustrator

March 24th, 2009 No comments

When creating a logo design, it’s good practice to use a vector-based application to construct it so that you’ll have a flexible logo design that can be used in numerous print and web-based mediums. Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard when it comes to creating vector-based logo designs.

In this collection, you will find 15 hand-picked tutorials from a variety of talented graphic designers and illustrators that discuss the logo creation process using Illustrator.

1. Logo Design Project Step by Step

 

logo_design

In this tutorial, UK-based graphic and web designer Chris Spooner walks learners through the process of creating a logo design for a company called myNiteLife. He discusses his process of sketching, typeface selection, all the way to digital illustration and production in Adobe Illustrator.

2. Create a Fly Logo Design Part 1 and Part 2

 

create_fly

In this two-part series, Sean Hodge takes us through the construction of a logo design for Webfly, a company that develops .NET applications for businesses. Part 1 of his tutorial discusses visual research, sketching, and illustrating the initial mockup in Illustrator. Part 2 goes over the revision process based on the client’s feedback, typical of graphic design gigs.

3. Silhouette Logo for a Steak House Restaurant in Adobe Illustrator

 

 

This tutorial goes through the methods behind producing a logo for a steak house restaurant. It discusses some common mistakes when designing a logo, and then goes through the preliminary sketching process, setting up your Illustrator document with a stock photo reference, all the way through the completion of the logo.

4. 3D logo Tutorial

 

3d_logo

You’ll read step-by-step instructions on how to create a three-dimensional iconic logo for the web in this tutorial. It goes over the initial construction of the shapes in Illustrator, and then finishing and refining the logo in Photoshop.

5. Web 2.0 Logo Reflection in Vector format with Illustrator

 

web_2

Talented designer and blogger Jay Hilgert teaches readers how to create a vector-based logo design. Since most "Web 2.0"-styled logos are created for the web and thus usually constructed in a raster-based application like Photoshop, companies that want to translate the logo onto print mediums (such as business cards or billboards) often run into trouble when scaling the dimensions of their logo. This tutorial shows designers how to create a more flexible vector-based logo.

6. Creating a crazy cool logo

 

creating_crazy

This logo design tutorial by Brazilian graphic/web designer and blogger, Fabio Sasso, shows us how he designed the logo for a company called Zagora. The technique involves creative use of the Ellipse tool, the Direct Selection tool to merge and delete anchor points, and using effects and the Gradient tool to add the finishing touches.

7. Roundtrip Logo from Illustrator to Photoshop

 

roundtrip

You’ll see the process of utilizing both Illustrator and Photoshop to create a grungy logo design in this video tutorial by Dave Cross (well-known Photoshop expert and author).

8. How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion

 

how_design

In this tutorial, you’ll read about creating a simple logotype from scratch. You’ll also read about some general rules when designing a logo, including the number one rule for logos: creating them in vector applications for flexibility.

9. 3D Logo

3d_logo1

Nick La, a Toronto-based freelance illustrator and web designer, shows us a technique for creating a three-dimensional logo that involves a couple of Illustrator effects, the Pathfinder tool for merging shapes, and the Gradient tool.

10. Design a Grungy Circular Logo

 

design_Grungy

In this logo design tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a circular logo with the company name wrapped around the outer perimeter (a popular logo design style).

11. Glossy Vector Web 2.0 Logo Text in 5 Easy Steps

 

glossy_vector

In this tutorial, you’ll discover a very simple technique for creating a vector-based, glossy logo style popularized by Web 2.0 startups.

12. How to Create a Trendy Retro Type Treatment

 

how_create

Illustrator and designer Ryan Putnam shows us the techniques involved in creating a retro-styled logotype design in this thorough step-by-step Illustrator tutorial. The tutorial uses the very popular (and free) fontface called Museo.

13. Environmentally Friendly Green Type Treatment

 

environ_ment

This text treatment Illustrator tutorial shares a technique for achieving a nature-inspired logotype design. You’ll observe a variety of techniques employed in the tutorial, including using the Pen tool to illustrate the leaves to be used in the text treatment.

14. Simple Logo Vector Tutorial

simple_logo

This tutorial goes over how to create an iconic logo design that uses folders. You’ll learn an assortment of illustration techniques such as using the Shape tool and direct selection to create simple objects.

15. Make a Logo Flow in Illustrator

 

make_logo

This tutorial goes over how Innosanto Nagara (of Design Action ) met the onslaught of requirements in creating a flexible logo design for a conference in Thailand using Adobe Illustrator. The piece was constructed in two components.

Categories: Designing Tags: , ,