Thread by @_EricHu

Late night long thread here. Warning you now.

Everyone has an opinion on what good design is, and most of those opinions are shallow and limiting. I’ve been designing for 17 years and I’ve heard every type of opinion on this subject. 1

The only thing I honestly still believe in after all these years is that: "Good Design Gives More Than it Takes."(1) 2

Good design isn’t always going to be simple, or rational, or solve a problem, or aesthetically compelling, but what good design should never do is “condescend through pretension or dumb itself down to a perceived baseline.”(2) 3

If we cannot say that there has to be some element of generosity in order for a piece of design to be considered good then I think we’re morally bankrupt as an industry. The viewer should leave with more after encountering a piece of design, not less. 4

But just as much as our final output needs to be generous, the way we work, and the way we view how we work should be in line with generosity as well. There's been a lot of discussion on copying vs originality in the past few months. None have been particularly satisfying. 5

On one hand, plagiarism is lazy. We know that. We just can't seem to agree what is considered plagiarism. A lot of my peers who huff and puff about originality keep making exceptions—often in self-serving. "It's okay when its public domain." "It's okay if you credit them." 6

All frameworks for taking, using, remixing, updating, referencing, attributing the work of others eventually fall apart unless it is coupled with some sort of analysis of power. 7

Contemporary discourse likes to frame power as a prism with class, race, and gender as its vertices. Someday perhaps we’ll add more vertices to this prism, but for now, the spectrum of power is formed from the intersection of each vertex. 8

Instead of coming up with an arbitrary list of when it's okay to reference something in my work, I personally try to ask myself, “Who benefits more from my actions? The powerful or the weak?" And start from there. 9

Pillaging from the dominant culture is still one of the most effective strategies that the marginalized, the fringe, and the invisible can do. It's not even about flipping it. Cloaking is just as valid. Not only should it be a right, it should be an obligation in certain cases.

But it's not that simple. What if I'm a marginalized designer but my client is a conglomerate? Was Duchamp exploiting the worker in the toilet factory or was he fighting against centuries of Western Art History? We can't be lazy and stop here. 11

But it's a start. If we start from a conversation of who benefits from a piece of design, we can orientate ourselves towards a more productive dialogue—especially because the mental muscles that consider cause and effect of a piece of work is so deeply embedded in design thinking

Okay, but then, on the other hand, we have 'originality.' But wait, is 'Originality' really the antithesis to plagiarism? I don't think so, especially in a climate where many people equate originality to being designed in a vacuum. 13

First of all, even if you can design in a vacuum, you shouldn't always want to. One of the most powerful things about visual culture is that it exists in a continuum. You can tap into a collective memory. 14

If you design a font, your letters are in conversation with every typeface that came before it.(3) If it somehow is so divorced from a common baseline of language, then you made a bunch of shapes. Maybe that's cool to you, but I don't find that particularly interesting at all. 15

Is the goal to make something no one has seen before or is it to make something that makes people question everything they have seen before? I don't think that's a trivial distinction. The former is about trying to remove yourself from history, the latter is fully confronting it.

Other people much smarter than I (4) have alluded to this previously, but at some point being a blowhard about making original work is tapping into the same capitalist, hyper-individualist tendencies that it was supposed to critique. The myth of the design auteur benefits no one.

At some point, centering originality in discourse responds to Capitalisms need for product differentiation. Be just 10% different and talk about it a lot, and now you're selling something. Take it too far and it becomes about the enforcement of private property. 18

I have to emphasize that this isn't shading anyone. If anything, I think I was one of the worst offenders of what I'm criticizing. I called people "mood board lords" and I was a blowhard about being original. 19

And I'm not saying that was all bad, but there was some bad—for example, I'm sure I made some students more self-conscious and paralyzed. But when I was in school, Tumblr wasn't big. I didn't realize how much of a privilege that was. Now students have seen everything. 20

And in trying to force themselves to be brand new, especially at the beginning of their journey, has often stopped them from learning valuable things. And if you're a student, you're not in power. You're never going to do the same damage as a company stealing from someone. 21/

So I regret a bunch of shit that I said. It doesn't mean I'm pro-copying. It just means I need to rethink some shit. And while it's not perfect, where I currently see it is, Originality is not the antithesis to Plagiarism. 22/

The antithesis of Plagiarism is more likely Sincerity. It's not about making a solution no one could have thought of, it's making a solution that makes people realize no other solution would have been more appropriate. Do that and it will be its own thing. 23/

Footnotes:
(1): Something Laurenz Brunner said
(2): Project Projects Manifesto for Gwanju Biennale
(3): Something Jeffery Keedy said
(4): Various tweets from @neuroticarsehol