I write a monthly col­umn in form, the Ger­man design mag­a­zine.
This one is about claim­ing other people’s work. Which is not bad style, it is theft.

Imi­ta­tion is not flattery

We’ve had two break-ins at our office recently. Sur­pris­ingly, noth­ing was ever stolen. At least noth­ing that we could see. We have no idea whether any data was secretly lifted from the server or ideas copied from all the sketches and print-outs on the walls. And if it had been, how would we mea­sure the dam­age and report it to the insur­ance? What is there to steal from a design stu­dio, except elec­tronic gad­gets and lots of cables?

There are hun­dreds of books out there whose only pur­pose is to serve as inspi­ra­tion for other design­ers. And it can be flat­ter­ing to find work that you know had been influ­enced by your own work or that of your team. There is, how­ever, a thin line in our busi­ness between copy­ing, adapt­ing, imi­tat­ing, quot­ing or just being inspired by some­one else’s work. And let’s face it: hardly any project war­rants inven­tion, because most clients feel more com­fort­able with some­thing sim­i­lar to some­thing else which is tried and tested.

Occa­sion­ally, thieves deliver them­selves inad­ver­tently. I have seen lots of port­fo­lios, printed or online, where some­one claimed author­ship for a project I knew they had not – or only mar­gin­ally – been involved in. Large projects like the ones I have been work­ing on over the past 25 years always need more than one designer, plus a host of other trades, be they pro­gram­mers, type­set­ters, project man­agers, assis­tants or numer­ous interns. And all of these can claim a piece of the action. But hav­ing worked on a project with other design­ers in a stu­dio doesn’t mean you alone were “the designer”. When­ever I show a project, I speak of “us” and I always try to credit as many peo­ple as the client will let us. I know that peo­ple move on and it does me proud to hear and see them men­tion the work we did together. As long as they speak the truth.

It should be easy: show the project, explain what your role was (maybe sim­ply “mem­ber of the design team”) and give credit to the agency or stu­dio who you worked for at the time, whether employed or as a free­lancer. Don’t for­get: poten­tial clients or employ­ers know that it is easy to copy and paste a com­plete port­fo­lio. I know that most design­ers I have worked with have a bet­ter archive than me, and I also know where most of their many fonts came from. What sur­prises me is the stu­pid­ity: peo­ple show me projects that I worked on and they didn’t, or they use ver­sions of fonts that I know were never pub­licly avail­able. And if they don’t send their port­fo­lios directly to me, look­ing for work, I see it when judg­ing com­pe­ti­tions or vis­it­ing friends’ stu­dios. This is a small busi­ness – at least some of us are friends first and com­peti­tors after­wards, and we talk to each other. And we do talk about appli­cants for jobs.

Claim­ing other people’s work is not bad style, it is theft. And being delib­er­ately unclear about the exact author­ship is not mod­est, but dis­hon­est. Intel­lec­tual prop­erty is what we cre­ate and thus own. And tak­ing that from a designer is not flat­tery by imi­ta­tion, but a crime.