arkitrave :: log

ShaunInman.com // Commentary // Pirated for Breakfast

On the recent proliferation of pirated sites:

Compare the two images. One is the original, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin house in Buffalo. The other is an anonymous prairie-style rambler, also in Buffalo.

The copy has many of the same features as the original - low hipped roof, brick, one-level, etc. But it is not being preserved at a cost of $17 $23 million. It is only one of many knockoffs (50 years later) of Wright’s masterpiece.

We can’t copyright things like a low roof. It is too general. People will adapt and copy past elements or designs - to suggest otherwise is to adopt the arrogant attitude that we can truly design something completely original. We can’t. Even Wright drew on inspiration from many sources for his “original”.

Why does this matter? There are good designers and bad designers. Designers who rip off websites are bad designers, or still learning. If they are making money off of the process, it is despicable.

But the knockoff is never as good.

The problem is: the knockoffs, oftentimes, give the original a bad name. There are many who cannot appreciate Wright because they hate the blandness of the type of house photographed above. There are people who can’t appreciate Mies van der Rohe because of the proliferation of crappy functionalist boxes of the 50s and 60s.

What will the result be with web design? We can only wait to find out. Will Shaun Inman get a bad name because of vodkaforbreakfast.com?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe this is why fashion moves in cycles. Original idea –> mass acceptance –> mass bad copying –> mass public hatred –> ignorance or disuse –> rediscovery.

Drop shadows, anyone?