Mere Inspiration: How Original Do Visual Designs Need to Be?
Obviously all visual designs build off each other, but what happens when you are inspired by a design and your new design – which you thought was original – ends up looking a lot like another?
The Casing
This is not idle thought. Several years ago, I redesigned Loud Dog’s website and it came out unintentionally looking very much like another website. The other website – Douglas Bowman’s Stopdesign – had launched to a lot of fanfare several months earlier, and I really liked what he had done. At the time of his launch, I looked at it quite a bit: I liked how his grid worked with his headers, how his masthead was integrated into the page, and I liked his nav bar. Then I went away.
The Purported Theft
Several months later, I began work on Loud Dog’s new website. Perhaps it was unconcious, perhaps less so (it was several years ago), but I integrated several elements of Stopdesign into our new design. When we launched, I was pretty happy. I thought it looked great. And then, several days later, I went and looked at Stopdesign. Holy crap! They looked very similar!
There were a lot differences (some of which are gone now, as he’s updated his site), but the fundamental designs looked very similar.
I was horrified. I had spent several months working on a new design, only to find out that I had completely ripped someone else’s design!
But had I?
The Design process
When I design something for Loud Dog, I always spend a long time on it. Loud Dog’s my baby, so I don’t do things half-assed. Instead, I go the other way and spend way too much time on it. With our website, I know that I went down a number of design directions and toyed with a bunch of different things before ending up where I ended up.
So I know that the design, though inspired by the other design isn’t directly stolen – it’s not like I referred to his design, made a few alterations and came out with my own – but they are awfully similar.
After realizing this, I wasn’t sure what to do. I had just spent months redesigning the damn thing, and I didn’t really want to go back and do it again, and I had clients breathing down my neck for work. So I decided that it could just be there for a couple months until I was able to go back and redo it. Of course, that was two years ago and I still haven’t.
And it hasn’t come up until last week, when I met a friend of a friend and he commented on it! Ah the embarassment! The shame, flooding back.
So, is it a ripoff?
This is an open question for me. I’m not sure. There are three basic similarities:
- The header-grids;
- The integration of the top banner with the overall grid;
- The three-column format;
- The beveled nav bar (of course, I use this everywhere – see Funambol, InsideWork and others, no doubt.
The three-column format isn’t anything unique, of course; it’s used everywhere. And those other two things are just good ideas! Beyond these things, the sites are very different:
- Typography. Both use verdana, but how many fonts do we have to choose from? I use Gill Sans for headers.
- Shadows. I am using my now-standard shadow things. I use shadows on everything!
- That bevely thing in the background. That was the biggest pain in the ass to code.
- I dunno. Most elements are completely different. The layout’s different, the IA and ID are different, and the code is different (I assume mine’s better, but I haven’t looked).
Conclusions
So, what’s the conclusion? I honestly don’t know. When you independently come up with a design that looks like another, do you go back to the drawing board? Do you try to identify the offending elements and get rid of them (which way is more influenced by the other design)? I don’t know the answers to these questions.