<story><title>Flat UI, mirrored</title><url>https://github.com/iurevych/Flat-UI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ameen</author><text>This whole episode has underlined a few major differences among developers and (current) designers. Developers are more open, contribute code and discuss about bettering each other.&lt;p&gt;While Designers seem secretive, ego-filled and seeking pointless exclusivity.&lt;p&gt;Eg: Developers: HackerNews / Github, etc
Designers: DesignerNews / Dribble, Forrst, etc.&lt;p&gt;Any designer that has been open about his work and process has become a legend - Dieter Rams, Johnathan Ive, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bpatrianakos</author><text>I think that&apos;s too broad of a generalization. I happen to walk the line between designer and developer and I know a lot of my fellow designers are very open about their process and work. Designers often share their tools and techniques openly. See the multitude of CSS frameworks, free fonts, PSDs, etc. I think the notion that they&apos;re more secretive less open comes from these cases where a designer &lt;i&gt;does&lt;/i&gt; make a stink about &quot;theft&quot;, &quot;copying&quot;, or whatever the terms they use may be. The thing about that is, well, first design is a very personal thing. Yes, there are rules and best practices, tools, and techniques that apply universally but at the same time good design also carries with it a piece of the designer. We take our designs personally. It&apos;s very hard to release an open source piece of design work because you need to make it in such a way that it can be effectively customized or used in such a way that the larger context makes it a unique work unless of course it&apos;s a rare case of the designer not caring if everyone in the world uses the design verbatim (see: Wordpress themes).&lt;p&gt;I know for me, personally, I&apos;ve put many design projects on GitHub - from the mockups to assets to the code to put a site together - knowing there&apos;s a chance someone will use it verbatim but hoping it gets used as a jumping off point or customized to make it someone else&apos;s.&lt;p&gt;With design, you can see when someone has ripped you off very obviously most of the time. You can&apos;t own design elements of course but its a very subjective thing that you just know when you see it. Developers and designers also think very differently in some areas. With developers everything is logical and black and white. With designers, much of their work is vague, fluid, and incredibly subjective. Emotion plays a role in the success of design often times whereas a developer&apos;s code will be just as useful and functional no matter how anyone &lt;i&gt;feels&lt;/i&gt; about it. As a developer, when I open source something, I know that I can&apos;t own the concept of a loop or a database query or whatever. What makes my code unique is the way in which I solve my problem and how it solves a problem that other code has not solved. I&apos;d be happy if someone forked my code, made it better, and started a new project from it that became popular. However I&apos;d be upset if someone took my design, added on to it, and passed it off as their own. The difference? On the surface there shouldn&apos;t be one. But beyond the surface it&apos;s all about the piece of yourself you put into design work.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this makes sense and doesn&apos;t just sound like rambling. I&apos;m sure I may need to clarify a few things I said so please ask if I said something vague.</text></comment>
<story><title>Flat UI, mirrored</title><url>https://github.com/iurevych/Flat-UI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ameen</author><text>This whole episode has underlined a few major differences among developers and (current) designers. Developers are more open, contribute code and discuss about bettering each other.&lt;p&gt;While Designers seem secretive, ego-filled and seeking pointless exclusivity.&lt;p&gt;Eg: Developers: HackerNews / Github, etc
Designers: DesignerNews / Dribble, Forrst, etc.&lt;p&gt;Any designer that has been open about his work and process has become a legend - Dieter Rams, Johnathan Ive, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mnicole</author><text>I think that this is part of a bigger problem; a lot of people find design to be &quot;easy&quot; in that it&apos;s subjective - Client A doesn&apos;t like your work but Client B does. Can&apos;t even get a job in the field? No worries, people flock to 99Designs and Fiverr for cheap, tacky work that validates the crummy designer. Working for someone with no morals? They&apos;ll show you some styles they like and tell you they want it &quot;exactly&quot; like that, and if you want a paycheck, you&apos;ll do it and &lt;i&gt;maybe&lt;/i&gt; you&apos;ll learn something about the technique that you can translate into more original works. Some people just honestly don&apos;t think they&apos;ll ever be caught or that they have a right to be &quot;heavily-inspired&quot; because &quot;you don&apos;t &lt;i&gt;own&lt;/i&gt; that&quot;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/&lt;/a&gt; has been around for awhile, but now with Pinterest, Dribbble and other resources, it&apos;s becoming a lot more common to find the people who are making it difficult for designers to feel like they can truly stand out.&lt;p&gt;Outside of flat copying/pasting code, it takes a little more to get it to be functional. By nature, lots of developers are working in teams where collaboration/pair programming is promoted to begin with. You work on projects where it is essential to team up to figure out what&apos;s going on and what could make it better. In order to ensure the project continues to move forward and work, there needs to be a method to the madness that everyone understands. At the agencies I&apos;ve worked at, while everyone was a designer, we all had our specialties and we didn&apos;t really work together much outside of talking about general branding guidelines/techniques, etc.&lt;p&gt;In design, all it takes is having the same software to mimic something. So when someone that is actually doing honest-to-goodness original, clever stuff gets jacked by the hacks-at-large, it is easy to get defensive and want to lock it down, particularly when you make your livelihood getting clients that like your style and it is suddenly watered down by clones and you&apos;re not getting paid to do what you made popular anymore. On Dribbble, I&apos;ve seen it go so far down the hole that people have both claimed the original artist was the hack or said &quot;Really reminds me of [hack]&apos;s work..&quot; on someone&apos;s copy of a copy.</text></comment>