Cheating is bad (as we’re told throughout our school years). We get penalized if we do it, so best not to do it in the first place.
This is the mentality I took on for most of my projects. It was even the reason why I didn’t want to do mood boarding, or an inspiration page for visual projects.
I thought everything had to be original. Everything had to come *untouched* from my own brain. This is what I thought creativity to be; hard work, sweat, tears, stuck in my own hole of dry thoughts.
What I failed to see was that all the great ideas/products/brands I already loved had in fact, cheated.They all stole from each other, which in turn made for better, stronger projects.
This is not to say that copying word for word, icon by icon, is the right thing to do. That’s not the message.
What cheating entails is a remix of theirs and yours. You can take a cue from someone else, but you have to do something different with it.
With design inspiration everywhere we look, it’s always our turn to go (and cheat).
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