Stealing Is a Skill

74 points by bewal416 2 hours ago | 58 comments

sandcat_ 53 minutes ago |

I feel like there’s a difference between Virgil Abloh being brought in to work on an iteration of the Air Force 1s and simply ripping off a design from an unrelated company, presumably without permission, and making a few tweaks.

willchis 48 minutes ago |

The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-...

sejje 3 minutes ago | |

Really love the "eye-grabbing top fold"

::looks at bootstrap hero styling::

Oh, right.

dghlsakjg 1 hour ago |

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.

fenomas 11 minutes ago | |

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.

dchftcs 1 hour ago | |

A bit tough to say this, but transformers are trained the same way.

pjm331 24 minutes ago | |

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

patrickscoleman 1 hour ago | |

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...

tokai 1 hour ago | | |

Pierre Menards Quixote is not a copy. It is a perfect recreation. While it is word-for-word identical to the original, the whole ironic humor of Borges text is that it is not a copy.

Edit: Which you might know well enough. Just wanted to add some more context.

erikschoster 59 minutes ago |

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.

cjcenizal 1 hour ago |

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.”

ecshafer 1 hour ago | |

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.

conartist6 49 minutes ago | |

And then, if you are great, you will steal not from one thing but from everything

emaro 1 hour ago |

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.

libria 1 hour ago | |

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.

sillysaurusx 1 hour ago | |

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.

jmercouris 34 minutes ago | | |

Why did you do this?

nusl 1 hour ago | | |

In the age on LLMs it's definitely way easier than what you did.

carlosjobim 1 hour ago | |

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.

dinkleberg 40 minutes ago |

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.

efitz 24 minutes ago |

“Stealing is a skill” is catchy but doesn’t express the underlying concept as well as your other principles. I would suggest “learn by copying good things”, or “quality work is where you find it” or something to that effect.

ohitsdom 42 minutes ago |

Isn't this essentially what LLMs do?

Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.

darepublic 33 minutes ago |

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.

jdw64 18 minutes ago |

Good artists copy, great artists steal. but this article doesn't seem to be about that.

deltamidway 1 hour ago |

Stealing is a source of flattery. I've had logos I've designed outright copied. Jokes on them: They discovered they could not copyright the mark and had to rebrand (again).

Stealing is stealing unless you're really good at it.

scaradim 37 minutes ago |

Stealing is indeed a skill... and a sin (target missed) - by experience not good for soul. Knowing what laws in the countries where your business evolve allow someone to get inspired (as state of the art) or reuse freely from other's work in specific industry is a more valuable skill... and better for soul. One could move smarter and faster with light soul around if rules of the game are known and all opportunities are considered and not missed.

meander_water 1 hour ago |

> However, it’s your job to go down the rabbit hole, learn the 100%, and sprinkle in your 3%.

I would say that there is a big difference between stealing without acknowledgement, and stealing with acknowledgement and actively learning through reverse engineering.

sscaryterry 1 hour ago |

Very, and really very few things, especially in software engineering is novel or new. Everything is the same old concepts, repackaged, tweaked, renamed. Cyclical in nature, fads come and go.

Stealing in this context might be tad harsh.

gobdovan 38 minutes ago |

Actual stealing is an even more impressive skill. Usually involves intensively trained sleight of hand, elaborate ruses, a very good understanding of theory of mind regarding the victim's attention, and planned deescalation paths in case you're caught.

graemep 1 hour ago |

Does this level of copying not imply a copyright infringement?

efilife 1 hour ago | |

Even if not, it's really, really distasteful

graemep 18 minutes ago | | |

Proudly admitting it in public seems foolish on both grounds.

z3t4 46 minutes ago |

What do you do if your version becomes immensely more popular and successful then the thing you copied? When people start calling you a genius.

a3w 1 hour ago |

Off-topic; but the nerd in me complained:

In GURPS, stealing is two skills: filch and pickpocket.

nusl 1 hour ago |

I think copying a website like this is very poor taste regardless. If I see you doing this, I immediately lose trust in your product and will immediately leave.

If you can't put the effort into the face of your product, how can I trust you to put effort into the product itself? Shitty behavior, with a shitty justification self-affirmation blogpost.

sdellis 51 minutes ago | |

I agree. It's telling that they picked such a boring and generic design to steal.

m8ven 2 hours ago |

Good artists copy, great artists steal?

Still hurts to be the one being stolen from though.

Folcon 1 hour ago | |

I don't think this is the same kind of stealing?

If you're being a great artist who steals you may perfectly reproduce something, but in such a different and novel context that it feels fresh, or taking something verbatim and then modifying it with your work, vs say taking an series of ideas from a work and then not really changing or moving from what they were originally expressing

An example of this is from Offworld Trading Company[0], which literally started by copying the market from Age of Empires[1] and then iterated on it as well as the auction mechanics from MULE[2], I vaguely recall them talking about this in their GDC talk[3], though I could be misremembering that(it's a good talk though)

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if anyone who was stolen from in those cases feels hurt by it

Compare that to stealing, where the parties stolen from were really quite angry at what was stolen, Triple Town vs Yeti Town[4], which very much looked like a lazy clone

-[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/Offworld_Trading_C...

-[1]: https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Market_(Age_of_Empires_...

-[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.

-[3]: Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2C4z_apu2I

-[4]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/spry-fox-and-the-clone-wars

zelias 11 minutes ago | | |

This game slapped

omegastick 1 hour ago | |

I'm a big fan of that quote, but always took it differently than the meaning associated with this article.

Good artists see an idea and use it. Great artists see an idea and _make it their own_.

lackoftactics 1 hour ago | |

there are only limited number of patterns for ui,ux, CTA. It sucks to be stolen from, but we build on top of each other most of the time

PashaGo 1 hour ago |

Most great products are nothing, but well-timed and well-executed stolen ideas.

nullbio 1 hour ago |

Mintlify "stole" their latest design off Stripe. It's very obvious.

N_Lens 1 hour ago |

The Tim Ferris school of thought. Can’t say I agree with it.

michaelfm1211 50 minutes ago |

This feels wrong.

InsideOutSanta 30 minutes ago | |

Yeah, this is kinda crazy. This isn't stealing some ideas, their website is a printscreen of the original with some colors shifted. I doubt this is even legal.

Rodmine 28 minutes ago |

OK, Benjamin.

MCP123 1 hour ago |

It's stealing when copyright is infringed and when the stealing part is not acknowledged. Otherwise, can we called it "inspired by"?

__MatrixMan__ 1 hour ago | |

No, that's just copyright infringement. It's stealing when the stolen thing is no longer accessible to the previous owner.

Consensus differs on whether both, or just one, is morally objectionable. Conflating them is problematic.

MCP123 31 minutes ago | | |

Agreed. Copying pixel by pixel feels wrong and also not very creative.

a4isms 1 hour ago | |

There is something of a tradition in the design world to use theft-shaped words for things we collect for inspiration/ideas. A piece of advice I followed in the 80s and 90s when paper was still a thing was to have a "Swipe File," which was a collection of things you saw and liked, on paper.

In my own case as a designer of desktop apps, my Swipe File was not just digital screen shots of parts of apps that I admired, but I physically printed them out as well so I could spread them on a desk, floor, and walls when brainstorming.

That word "Swipe" also inspired the name of a design store catering to creative professionals in my home town, Toronto:

https://www.swipe.com/about

65 42 minutes ago |

This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

michaelfm1211 45 minutes ago |

"Yes your honor, I copied it pixel-by-pixel."

mannanj 1 hour ago |

I looked up stealing to ground this comment of mine:

> stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice

I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments about copying someones digital creation doesn't really mean you took what they had from them, you just made a copy, though this doesn't logically apply to if I also physically stole someones product and made a copy since copyright/patent protection likely applies)

anonyfox 1 hour ago | |

the very point is that theft means you no longer have something since someone else has. copying is you still have it and someone else now too. there is no harm done by copying, except you actually believe that exclusivity as a separate concept is important to you. (debatable, I don't).

sokoloff 59 minutes ago | |

> fetishize, herbicide and normalize

I’m very curious what “herbicide” was an auto-complete for here…

Noumenon72 33 minutes ago | | |

ChatGPT guesses "heroicize".