It’s something we all strive for as we spend hour after hour sketching, thinking, writing, trying to come up with something that stands apart from what’s already been done. We’re all unconsciously influenced by the things we’ve seen, read, and heard, and those things inevitably appear in our work. I read somewhere that everything original has already been invented, so all we’re doing is recreating variations of those things (unless you create some snazzy new scientific gadget, of course).

It’s cool to see the different influences that appear in people’s work, and how those influences get combined and reinterpreted in new ways. What isn’t so cool is when emulating something turns into copying. There’s an article in the New Yorker about how designer brands are getting copied and that it’s not such a bad thing because it keeps the designers productive (they have to keep churning things out so that the knockoffs can’t keep up). I agree with that, to a certain extent, but it doesn’t condone copying. There’s something so distasteful about blatantly taking someone’s images or words and using them as one’s own.

Darker thoughts aside (because I can run off a list of instances where friends in art, design and illustration have had their work copied after sharing it online), I think that’s where the fun and challenge of making things lies ~ everyone’s making stuff these days, so how do you come up with something to be recognized as distinctly yours, to claim that, and then continue to make new and interesting things afterwards?

September 24th, 2007