THE FACADE OF ORIGINALITY: HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST
By Joe Baske
Since its release in 2012, Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative has been touted as a must-read text for creatives seeking to build a stable artistic foundation. Among its many trailblazing qualities was its initiative to popularize the phrase “steal like an artist,” a quippy term that bridged the gap between absolute originality and outright theft.
In Kleon’s partnering TedX speech promoting the book, he outlines the creative process of acclaimed composer Igor Stravinsky. When tasked with composing new ballets, Stravinsky would deconstruct his favorite classical scores and rearrange their structure to his liking. The end result would be a product that simultaneously offered listeners something original while still featuring glimpses of works from past artists to the most trained of ears. Stravinsky was far from the first to embrace “stealing like an artist,” but was among the first to openly document this process. For these admissions he faced great short-term scrutiny, only for this process to morph into a creative blueprint.
Described as a "music revolutionary," Stravinsky's work demonstrates many aspects of the creative process today considered foundational.
Fast forward to modern times, and the art of sampling has become a staple in the world of hip-hop and pop. Classic country, jazz, and blues tunes are constantly being remixed and reinvented by younger generations with a keener ear on the contemporary musical landscape. The most talented of such can bridge that generational gap by transforming older sounds into something that can appeal to the demands of the modern listener.
“To be an artist is to be a collector” Kleon writes. Artists collect and observe, and that process is what serves as the foundation to their creations. Art, in its purest form, is a creation spawned from an amalgamation of past works.
“The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.”
Anyone in any creative field will be quick to regard theft as among the most devastating and unequivocal no-no’s. It’s essentially a career ruiner for even the most talented of artistic minds. And yet, as Kleon outlines, a pinch of it is necessary. What we create is built off the backs of what’s been created before us. We didn’t establish hierarchy, or contrast, or general color theory as design principles ourselves. We were each given a blueprint we had to study before effectively expanding upon through the creation of our work.
There is no great artist that weren’t preceded by great artists of another generation. And no art, from any time period, can exist without the context of all that inspired it and all that it would go on to inspire. None of what’s been made can exist in a vacuum.
So what’s originality anyway? It’s not finding inspiration for a new design concept out of thin air. Instead, it’s merging the ideas of others into something new, something that may mimic certain elements of something else, but holds artistic value on its own even without the initial material it spawned from. In the world of design, this is what it means to be original.
While design principles can be studied on paper, many of them can be subconsciously absorbed through constant consumption. Broadly speaking, the internet has simultaneously illustrated to us the benefits and dangers of unlimited access to information, but in the field of design it’s hard not to view this privilege as an absolute plus. Social media sites like Pinterest and Instagram offer users countless examples of effective design that’s personally tailored to precisely match what appeals to them.
Take the project shown below, where a client tasked me with designing a timeline. My first move was to go to Pinterest to seek out inspiration. That inspiration came in the form of the American Revolution timeline graphic also displayed below. I took many of the visual ideas from this graphic and morphed it into a design that matched the desires of my client. Looking at the two side-by-side, and it’s clear to see where I took inspiration. However, this design can still be branded as my own for the fact that it can’t be mistaken as anything close to a one-to-one replica. While the color palette and typefaces of the two pieces fit the same general aesthetic, enough aspects of the design are different for my work to qualify as an “original” piece.
In my experience I’ve found that the utter vastness of most social media platforms mean that they’ll all feature niche corners in which tremendous inspiration for stunning design concepts can be extracted. It’s simply a matter of tailoring your algorithm to serve you content of this variety. For as much scrutiny as Twitter (or X) receives for being overrun by bots and adopting a heavy right-wing agenda, my algorithm still primarily consists of pretty oil paintings and fun motion graphics from professionals in the field. In the pursuit of keeping you around for as long as possible, these platforms will allow you to turn them into what you want them to be. Their greatest strengths are giving you precisely what you want, and if you’re a designer that wants some artistic inspiration, it goes without saying how this core feature of these social media platforms can function in your favor.
But designers know that there’s no limit to where inspiration can be derived from. The only real step in finding it is trying to. The simple act of looking for art reveals to one that it’s always been everywhere. It’s in the films we watch. The books we read. The songs we listen to. The clothing we wear. The food we cook. The gardens we grow and flowers we plant. The houses we walk past. The oceans that surround us and the cloudy skies that rest above us. All of this can become sources of inspiration when looking through the lens of a designer who deliberately seeks to find art in the mundane.
Nature is an easy place to start. Aside from simply being pleasant to observe, research suggests that getting outside can stimulate the brain in ways that can enhance one’s creative capacity. A 2004 study noted a correlative relationship between the presence of even a single indoor plant and increased productivity with creative tasks, suggesting that nature, even in its smallest doses, can positively impact our creative process. Further, nature presents us with a dizzying array of aesthetically pleasing patterns and color schemes that can also be used as sources of inspiration.
It is integral that aspiring designers rid themselves of the mindset that what they must create should be wholly original. As a matter of fact, it is the greatest and most talented of artists and designers that are most informed about the works of the creatives that came before them. It is difficult for aspiring designers to build momentum in their young careers without this concept being instilled. Thus, this should be regarded as a pillar of basic design theory, as without it, there is no starting block established for designers to kickstart their careers.
“Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else—that’s how you’ll get ahead.”