Moving from Borrowing Ideas to Stealing like an Artist

At ZEAL, I am the Director of Design. Over the past year, I’ve mentored and coached a couple of junior designers on our team. Last week, one of them admitted, “I’m paranoid about copyright infringement. How do I move from borrowing ideas to stealing like an artist?”

“Steal like an Artist” is a phrase that Austin Kleon coined in his book Steal like an Artist:

Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The honest artist answers, “I steal them.” -Austin Kleon

Even Pablo Picasso is credited with saying, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

And if this concept makes you cringe, I’d even argue it’s biblical: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9

Nothing is original.

Everything is a mutation or a mashup of different thoughts and ideas.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. -Steve Jobs.

Therefore, it’s the artist’s job to determine “what’s worth stealing?”

Collecting Ideas

I’m constantly downloading images and taking screenshots. Even when I’m out and about and see a poster, mural, or window display that I like, I’ll take a picture of it. I’m a digital packrat. Disk space is cheap.

However, part of becoming a great designer is looking at something you like and articulating why you like it. Is it the color palette? Typography? Spacing?

Most designers — even beginning designers — have good taste. They know what looks good and what doesn’t. But there’s a gap between what you know works and what you can execute.

Part of the journey of a designer is learning how to close the gap between recognition and execution. And something as seemingly minor as looking at an image and being able to talk about it helps close that gap. Suddenly, you’re pointing out the elements that were executed well.

It’s easier to do this exercise and collect imagery when you don’t need it and are not up against a deadline. Build a visual repository so that when you are up against that deadline, your brain already has the resources, it already has the dots laid out, you just need to make those connections. The more good ideas you collect, the more you have to choose from.

Garbage in, garbage out.

I’ve systematically collected images since 2008. 😱 That’s right, 15 years' worth of data! I still enjoy going back through all the assets I’ve saved. It’s interesting to see how trends have evolved and how my tastes have changed as I’ve matured.

At first, I kept everything in Evernote. But now, I use Notion. Inside, I have a “Master Inspiration Gallery.” Every day, I’ll drag and drop the images I’ve collected onto this board. Then, on a good day, I’ll tag each card based on the color, style, and origination. Then, inside, I might make notes or add commentary.

One of the perks of managing these projects within Notion is linking my inspiration database to other views, filtering, and sorting by a project’s requirements.

I also have a board within FigJam, where I’ve created a giant mood board, grouping imagery by styles and projects. But, again, it’s all about making connections, so sometimes it helps to look at the same dataset differently.

Once you have your “dots,” what then? How do you make connections and know which elements to “steal”?

Limit Yourself

If you look at an image and say, I like THAT. I want to use THAT in my project. — that’s fine, but limit yourself to one “THAT” per project. If you incorporate more than one THAT from a project, then you’re no longer stealing like an artist; you’re just stealing.

The THAT could be the navigation placement in the bottom left and the subtle animation when the user hovers over an individual element. Use THAT but use a different typography treatment, color palette, and spacing. Treat THAT as inspiration and nothing more.

Distance Yourself

Another trick I’ll use is trying to get some distance from the thing I like. So, for example, I won’t constantly refer back to my reference imagery. Instead, I use a foggy memory to my advantage.

I’ll also do something similar by making notes within a Moleskine. I’ll sketch the elements I like and note what works. Then, throughout the project, I’ll look at my notes instead of the original. Again, my notes help obscure the original piece.

The forced distance helps me think about ideas differently, separating myself from the original idea, making new connections, and genuinely stealing like an artist.

Do you have a system for thinking and coming up with new ideas, visual or not?