Stealing Your Way to Original Designs

I have a framework that I find very helpful in teaching my apprentices how to design. It’s 3 steps:

Here are the details.

1. Imitate

The first step to being just a competent designer — or a competent anything, for that matter — is doing what someone else can do. It’s a test: can you follow directions? Except, instead of following directions you read or hear, you follow directions that you see.

It’s no coincidence that junior designers often get trained up by doing production work…