Inspiration, appropiation or copy?
May 2011
By Lai Guim
Since workspace.cl was published in the book Web Design Index.04, we’ve had an unprecedented amount of visitors, which is always rewarding. But when you notice that your work is deliberately copied in other projects, you must be a robot to remain indifferent. We all looked, we all seek inspiration around, but the design challenge is precisely how to reinterpret this appropriation to achieve something new, something made by yourself.
I decided to start register these situations —not to say start to collect this copies— and share them here.
The first one I noticed to base her site on ours was Samantha Díaz, a designer of Mexico, she not only took away the same beautiful magenta we have —considering that she had 16,777,215 other colors to choose—, but also she used in real time our files to make up her contents. This is how some of the workspace.cl contents was going around in the background of her stuff. What a lack of style. Anyway, her site no longer exists, this was back in 2009.
This year, the second I discover is a french boy, also a designer, Benjamin Lizón-A Lugrin. At least he made a copy of the files and was able to define another color for himself. And I have to admit that yellow doesn’t looks bad. I would really appreciate it if this code has a mention of the original authorship of the design, but I guess that’s too much to ask.
Maybe it is time to do something new and take all this just as a compliment. The good news is now I can consider my code as a something alive, something being multiplied on the net. I just have to say: “Thanks for coming, so good to inspire you, your site is super nice”.