steal snazzy styles
After immersing themselves in blogs, Untidy wondered, Am I inspired, or stealing?:
I'm still exploring my style. I'm new to this whole blogging thing, so I'm still figuring out what I want to blog about, how I want my blog to look, the tone, etc. The problem is that sometimes I come across blogs that are so cool and make me want tont to steal or emulate specific elements. It could be a font, a color palette, or a stylistic choice.
Constraining your presence can assist your message delivery, but it's not something required from the get-go. What you want to communicate, how you want that to look, and your tone can all be iterated on over time.
While they are both fun activities, I appreciate how active stealing or emulating specific elements can be compared to exploring your style. I treat the former less like a problem and more like a learning opportunity. Finding a specific element cool doesn't mean you can replicate it in one go without assistance. Also, your taste could very well change as you implement it, leading to an unexpected rendition that rocks all the same.
As I feel these kleptomaniac urges, I wonder if it's okay for me to copy an element? Is that inspiration? Or is that theft? I'm sure it matters how big the element I want to copy is: if I steal a blog's entire aesthetic, style, and tone, that would be clearly bad. But maybe copying one element would be okay?
With how copying an element like a font, color palette, or stylistic choice doesn't impact the original, I view the action as inspiration over theft. Moreover, I don't treat stealing something's entire aesthetic, style, and tone as clearly bad. People will yell from the rooftops about how it's condemnable plagiarism. I see it as the gift of propagation. It's super cool that people like Perfect and Victor nearly copied my agave theme for bear blog to our mutual benefit. Getting to see other people enjoy the fruits of my labor mixed with my design sensibilities is worthwhile. Be so prolific and successful that "plagiarism" gets subverted into spreading your signal far and wide.
I wonder if the blogs that I appreciate built their blog by stealing/being inspired by many different sources. Or did they just generate these ideas or designs internally? If so, how do I learn to generate original ideas?
Even internal designs are profusely influenced by external ideas whether the designers are privy to them or not. Replace originality with expressing your taste through as many inspirations as it takes.