From Copy What You Like · 5 notesNoteExampleDemo
How do you avoid copying the wrong things? Copy only what you genuinely like.1 That would have saved me in all three cases. I didn't enjoy the short stories we had to read in English classes; I didn't learn anything from philosophy papers; I didn't use expert systems myself. I believed these things were good because they were admired.
It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation2. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's an outlier.
Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see3, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown4.
That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting: you have to figure out for yourself what's good. You can't trust authorities.5 They'll lie to you on this one.
1Note
Use the apps you copy from. If you don't use it every day, you don't know why it works.
2Demo
Design in grayscale first. Without color you see if the layout works.
Design in grayscale first →3Example
Glass, gradients, huge heroes. Easy to see, easy to copy. The hierarchy under them is not.