/mike

Today a friend of mine found out his site got ripped. In this day and age ripping someone’s site so blatantly is the lowest of the low. And you’re going to get caught.

If you’re selling yourself as a designer or design agency you should either have enough talent to design something great yourself, or the money to pay someone else to do it for you. Be inspired by someone else’s work but don’t steal it, change some colours and two graphics, then call it your own.

It’s a popularity contest

If you’re going to steal someone’s design you should pick a good one. Here’s the problem, the good designs are usually popular and widely known. You’re shooting yourself in the foot right from the beginning because someone is bound to notice the theft.

Good design gets promoted. Good designers get promoted. People look at popular, promoted designs to get inspiration and learn from their peers, mentors, and idles. You’re seriously deluded if you think you won’t get noticed using a stolen design and passing it off as your own.

Make an excuse. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

When you’re stealing a design and you get caught — and almost everyone gets caught eventually — don’t use the excuse that you were “just seeing how things worked wasn’t going to keep it up[sic]” (source). Why? Because you’re lying. And you’re apparently really bad at it.

That excuse has been used over and over again. Every time I see another design theft when the thief finally reveals themselves and wants to win back some favour, they use that excuse.

“My bad. I’m just learning and wanted to learn from the best.”

“Oh, I only wanted to know how they did this or that.”

“This is just a temp site. I’m too busy to work on my own and needed something up right away.”

Anyone working in the web that is worth a damn knows about testing environments. Hell, anyone that’s built anything on or with a computer knows about testing. Using the “testing it out” excuse implies to me that you think you’re above testing your work. This reeks of immaturity and unprofessionalism. Would you build a client’s website and throw it on their live server just to see how things worked?! I don’t think so.

Grow up people. Get a better excuse. Better yet, get some talent.