I work for a very large NGO, and am their web designer. I have been really challenged recently about not duplicating other people's creativity but innovating and coming up with my own ideas. I was in a meeting and the person running the presentation was showing some concepts for a new site which (design wise) was a rip off of the BBC website and wasn't very innovative from a design perspective. They asked me what I thought, and I said half-jokingly 'it's a bit 2006' (which was when the BBC new home page was designed). I hope I didn't offend them! But I am having a personal war against my own experience of not innovating but duplicating.
For years I did this, because I had very low budget jobs where design was definitely not high on the priorities for expenditure and I myself had little time to spend on it, so it was a case of ripping of another person's work and just changing a few colours or sizes. Then after that I found it was easier for me to just reproduce what I had done for other client's sites than be thinking about ripping off a current web design that might have been fresh.
What did that result in? A load of my sites looking very 2003-2004 for a long period of time. I am not proud of my old portfolio from a design perspective. When I recently joined a design agency and met a load of creative and innovative people I was inspired by them, and thought I'm never going to do this again. If there is a small budget for design in future jobs, I'll either not do the job, or really press for the budget to be increased because in today's web sphere it's really important!
So, don't duplicate, innovate. If you are a creative person you can call on those God given gifts that you were born with and utilise them to make something beautiful. If you struggle, look around for inspiration but be thinking 'how can I improve this', not 'how can I nick this'. I speak to myself first and foremost.
You can do it!! Get creative.
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