Tag: Inspiration

Trying to make it unique

January 16th, 2011 · Jacob · Design No comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

While trying to annul my unread feed count in my reader, I stumbled upon Jason Gross’s article on Six Revisions about ‘10 Ideas for Creating Innovative and Unique Web Designs’. I liked it as it echoed most of my practices when it comes to creating unique websites. So instead of adding just a comment there, I thought I should resound the opinions on this topic here.

CSS Galleries

Avoiding CSS Galleries for inspiration would be a good tip for experienced designers but for newbies who are learning about web design, it familiarizes them with common styles and practices followed by the general community. You may get inspired by it so much that sometimes you tend to replicate the same style. It may not even occur to you that you may have ‘ripped’ the style. I have been following such galleries for about 5 years now and have noticed a lot of trends emerging.

The Bandwagon effect

‘Most designers are doing it, Why not me?’ We are unknowingly saying these lines. A simple example would be the use of bold, 32+ px slogans appearing as the banner nowadays. Even though, it is the perfect canvas to experiment with today’s web fonts and typographical clusters it is making the layouts more or less same. I have found myself filling a 300px wide area just below the menu and pondering about a good text to make the site banner. Why? I just saw 10 websites like that. Infact my new redesign is still in the drafts folder because it looks very familiar. Community instills in one person the ‘herd instinct’. There is nothing wrong following the herd but to stand out, you have to lead the herd to a different direction. Where design is much better, more refined and when a new trend starts.

I take inspiration from milk cartons, sweet wrappers, print ads, and origami… anything that is not a website. I try to adapt them into design that can be rendered in a browser. This works for me as there will be at-least some part of the design that is refreshing.

Constraints

Knowing that it is going to be a wordpress blog immediately renders a 2 column layout in my mind. Because I know how websites are coded, the developer in me screams out to keep the design in a way I can quickly do it. The time set by my clients’ ticks out my design into one that was churned out from a template. Some constraints are always there. To manage them and still produce a unique design identifies a great designer from a herd of good designers.

I have never tried collaborating with 2 or more designers before. Maybe this is one exercise I should do very soon. The blend of different softwares, practices and techinques can do the trick. ‘To make it unique’.

Inspiration = Rip?

July 29th, 2007 · Jacob · Critique, Design, Writing 3 comments - Tags: , ,

At one glance , an innocuous word, ‘inspiration’ may seem to be related to the great paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci produced due the influence of Verrocchio, his teacher. Inspiration is usually associated with art and design.

In olden days, inspiration was thought to of a divine nature. The people believed it to be a gift of god. As time traveled across centuries of development, renaissance and revolution this inspiration found new meanings. Nowadays it is concerned with education,personality, paintings (abstract art too) and websites . Inspiration has found new galleries to showcase themselves in different mediums. They are umpteen inspirational personalities, masterpieces, materials and products available now(which makes me think that there is hardly anything divine in it anymore.)

I would like to center this post around ‘web inspiration’ a rather new term which has many possibilities of advancements and ramifications in different directions (and the way it gets corrupted by rippers and plagiarists). Before we get into this topic let me show you one of my works. A simple cover i did for my college magazine and the art that inspired me to do it(the one on the left is mine).

MomentThe Time

Well as you can see the better one is the original found from here .

 

First Question!.Is my art a rip of the other? The fact that I’m calling the other one ‘an original’ is itself an assertion of the fact that i borrowed a lot of ideas from ‘the time‘ by Nazan Dedeoglu. Borrowed? uh oh! I don’t know Nazan. Borrowing without his consent is stealing right? Assuming the above case to be true i rephrase my statement. I stole his art!. But then in my defense i have a sweet word which is manipulated by every known ripper artist in the world(i’m not one,in any way).

Inspiration .

 

Boy!Haven’t we always wondered what the difference between the words Inspiration and a Rip means.

 

Many websites have been on the lookout for Web rip off! On such site is pirated-sites.com.(check out their more believable Flickr account with screen shots) Obviously the hapless culprits tried to model upon the the original site,(starting from pure inspiration), slowly accumulating a lot of the parent website features and finally transforming into a truly fascinating rip of the former. Most of the websites under attack are from people in the same circle of involvement, say Web design studios. The best part is the style how the original creators write about their ripper counterparts! They go commenting from ‘shameless f**king @#$%@’ to ‘nice try buddy,better luck next time. While most of the counterfeits are dismissed off with a ‘disgraceful act’ tag, the clicks to the uri keep increasing dramatically, (increasing the link popularity dumbo!). The ripped sites are usually replaced with more impressive original creations in very short time.

 

Inspiration usually is accepted if it is about using the styles of the original artist in a different way with his/her flavor mixed in it to produce an completely different art.Whoosh!Thats all i can squeeze out of me. Besides it all depends on what the original artist thinks about his alleged rip off art.

 

FOOTNOTES:

1)My art was not used in any profitable venture or my college magazine( ,they rejected it because it was too complex a concept of time!) or was not sold to any enterprising group. Besides i still think it is an inspired art. Oops there we go again!…