Stealing Far and Near
Every young creative gets some sort of advice early in their career about ‘stealing’, a term that is probably used more for its shock value than for its accuracy. The original form of the quote,
“Good artists borrow; great artists steal.”
is often dubiously attributed to Faulkner, Whitman, Picasso, or any number of other oft-vaunted creative geniuses. Following that, the young creative might discover Austin Kleon’s seminal “Steal Like An Artist”, a compendium of wisdom that offers great advice on how to take inspiration from others and remix it into your own practice.
I had a friend in college named Caitlyn, an immensely talented and proficient illustrator with a deep understanding of history. I’m certainly no expert purveyor of illustration as an art, but her work immediately stuck out to me as unique among the gamut of what I was seeing at the Savannah College of Art and Design. When I asked her about her inspirations, she said the following:
“Go around the Illustration department and ask everyone who they’re being inspired by. You’ll get a lot of answers that match the popular illustrators of today. Tomer Hanuka. James Jean. Kim Jung Gi. The secret is to steal from people who no one else is stealing from. Find sources that aren’t being stolen from. Maxfield Parrish. J. C. Leyendecker. Use color schemes that haven’t been plastered all over Hi-Fructose and ArtStation. Bonus points for going back at least a generation, 30 years or so. People have a much harder time figuring out that you’re stealing when your sources are more obscure.”
A decade later I still remember it as a pretty formative experience for my fledgling creative brain. As I’ve gotten older, however, I find that applying it in product design is a different game. Succeeding at illustration is a game of superlatives. To succeed is to produce something of unique artistic merit as compared to your peers such that you may get hired (and of course, celebrated for your work). Success in product design, however, is solution-oriented. It relies on a delicate mix of soliciting user feedback, understanding user expectations, and product goals. Wowing your end user is a wonderful thing, but it is only one piece of the puzzle.
How does this apply to stealing, then? This is where we must revise the initial statement to read “Steal Far and Near”. This is to say, understand what your direct competitors are doing and why it succeeds, but also look to sources far away from your line of work to see how they are innovating the game. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, unless, of course, there’s a perfectly good reason to. To understand how users perform the most basic interactions you need to account for, see how your competitors do it. To see new and exciting microinteractions, see what the leaders in the design space are doing. And of course, never be afraid to turn far back in history to find something truly inspirational (with, of course, the understanding that it may need to be smoothed over or updated to fit a modern audience’s expectations).
Austin Kleon makes the claim very early on in his book that nothing is completely original. Artists have been reworking, reconfiguring, and remixing the ideas of those that came before them for as long as the concept of creativity has existed. As designers at RocketReach, our job is to produce something that is functional, intuitive, but also surprising. Next time you’re tasked to build something, push out of the tendency to look for the usual inspirations, and find something truly exhilarating to steal an idea from.
