30 Days to Your First Website Design

Lesson Notes * Be Inspired, But Don’t Copy

Transcript Hey guys – Welcome (back) to 30 Days to Your First Website Design, a Tuts+ premium course. I’m Ian Yates and congratulations are in order: you’ve completed the Planning workflow section of this series, so now we’re going to move on to some meaty Design Theory.

This screencast is a little bit different and serves as a quick welcome to the Design Theory section.

I’m going to wag my finger at you. Before we jump into design concepts, I’m going to list three don’ts:

Number 1: Don’t copy someone else’s work. You’re surrounded by influential design during every minute of the day, so it’s inevitable you’re going to take lessons and inspiration away from them. Inspiration can be defined as being mentally stimulated to create something.Plagarism is when someone recreates or imitates an original piece of work.

Copying someone’s work does them no justice (and could actually lead to legal trouble) but, almost more importantly, does the copier no favors either. There’s a good chance that what’s been copied isn’t suitable for the copiers objectives. We’re going to look into design decision making in order to tailor our designs to our own needs.

Number 2: Don’t work backwards from a foregone conclusion. You may have a beautiful looking site in your mind’s eye, a good start you think, and it’s sometimes easier to deal with than the terrifying blank canvas. But don’t try and force your design to fit this attractive vision. Build from the ground up.

Number 3: Don’t use all available bells and whistles just because you can. It’s logical that you’ll see the success of some websites and themes, and try to recreate that success by including similar tricks. jQuery slideshows, twitter feeds, Flickr feeds, animated menus, whatever, but don’t be fooled into thinking that those are the reasons behind a design’s success. Begin at the beginning, then if your design warrants them, use the extra flourishes to enhance your work.

Now, as this video was a bit different, there’s no real assignment this time, but I do have more Webdesigntuts+ recommended reading for you: Check out “Be Inspired, But Don’t Copy” by Connor Turnbull. He puts forward some compelling arguments and talks about the difference between copying and being inspired.

Alright, lecture over! Next time on 30 Days to Your First Website Design, we’re going to take this lesson a bit further and examine Inspiration. This is Ian Yates, and from all of us here at Tuts+, thanks for listening!