The Echo of the Original: Plagiarism in the World of Design

Contributor - Bhavana Ramesh
August 6, 2024
3 min read

Imitation: The Sincerest Form of Flattery or the Death of Creativity?

In the murky waters between inspiration and imitation lies a question: What does it mean to copy in the world of design? If a product looks, feels, and functions the same as the one that inspired it, is it still art or merely an echo of the original? Today, this debate is more alive than ever.

It’s a delicate dance: a product conceived in the hands of one designer is reborn in the hands of another, and suddenly, what was once an original becomes a shadow of its former self. Even within the same company, a product’s second iteration can feel like a cheap replica.

The Sacrality of the Singular

Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, explored this idea in his seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin argued that technological reproduction strips an object of its aura, a mystical quality tied to its originality and presence in time and space. The sacredness, the ritual of art, crumbles when it’s endlessly copied. What was once rare is now common. In the digital age, we’ve moved beyond merely reproducing objects—we’re manufacturing designs and ideas with unprecedented ease, blurring the line between homage and theft.

There is a tragedy here, in the way industrial production has transformed what was once sacred into something mass-produced and disposable. The individuality of creation is now buried beneath layers of duplicates, and the line between inspiration and imitation is blurred.

Shein, Temu, and the Copycat Economy

Mass-market fashion giants like Shein and Temu have become notorious for swiping the designs of small, independent artists who can’t afford the legal fees to fight back. It’s a David-and-Goliath tale, but with more polyester. These rip-offs flood the market at a fraction of the price, reeling in customers who aren’t looking for originality, just affordability. The quality suffers, but the damage done to the original creators is far more profound. Suddenly, the designer’s voice is muffled by the noise of cheap imitations.

In the age of instant replication, what does it even mean to “own” a design? And when does inspiration cross the line into theft?

Copying, Plagiarism, and the Creative Dilemma

The tension between originality and imitation is as old as art itself. Even Vincent Van Gogh, the tortured genius, spent hours copying the masters. His painting, Bridge in the Rain was a reinterpretation of Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857) an earlier work by Utagawa Hiroshige. The great artists, after all, learn by mimicking, by borrowing, by reshaping what came before.
Does that make Van Gogh a plagiarist? Hardly.

But in today’s hyper-commercialized design world, this age-old practice of learning through imitation has taken a darker turn. Copying has become big business, a commercialized machine that churns out duplicates with ruthless efficiency. Yet, there’s a fine line between taking inspiration from something and ripping it off.

You don’t need a degree in design to understand that every creation is built on the foundations of what came before. In this sense, “originality” is more of a romantic myth than a tangible goal. But there’s a vast difference between learning from a style and flat-out lifting a design—an ethical dilemma the design world continues to grapple with.

The tech world, for instance, has long been a battleground for the ‘inspired vs. stolen’ debate. In one famous spat, Apple borrowed heavily from Xerox’s graphical user interface design, only to later sue Microsoft and HP for “copying” the same designs. So can one really own a design? Patents, often sold as the protectors of innovation, in reality, can act as roadblocks. Instead of fostering creativity, they sometimes stifle it, trapping ideas in legal nets that suffocate further development.

Can You Own a Color?

Few stories encapsulate the absurdity of ownership in the art world quite like the Saga of Vantablack. Known as the “blackest black,” this color absorbs nearly all light, creating an eerie void wherever it’s applied. British artist Anish Kapoor, infamous for his penchant for exclusivity, purchased the rights to Vantablack, hoarding it for himself like a dragon guarding its treasure. By hoarding this pigment, he essentially locked the doors to the art community, depriving them of a shared tool for creativity.

Cue the collective outrage. Artists, who thrive on collaboration and shared mediums, were appalled. One such artist, Stuart Semple, decided to fight back. His weapon? Black 2.0—a nearly identical black, available to everyone…except Kapoor. Semple’s tongue-in-cheek response became an instant hit, complete with a cheeky disclaimer: “By adding this product to your cart, you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated with Anish Kapoor, and to the best of your knowledge, this paint will not make its way into his hands.”

Semple’s rebellion against Kapoor speaks to a larger issue in the design world: can someone truly “own” an idea, a color, or even a design? And even if they can, Should they?

The Copycat Conundrum: When Innovation Imitates

There’s a school of thought that says copying is essential to innovation. You start by replicating, and somewhere along the way, you find your own voice. In this view, copying isn’t theft—it’s growth. It’s the artistic process in action. After all, if every idea were owned, we’d have no creativity at all. We’d be stuck in a world where patents block progress, where every innovation is strangled by legal red tape and ethical conundrums.

But when you scroll through Shein’s catalog and see an independent artist’s design being sold for pennies, it’s hard to maintain such a rosy view of imitation. The line between riffing on an idea and ripping it off may be thin, but the stakes are high. Small designers can’t survive on homage alone. They need credit—and compensation.

Originality in a World of Remixes

So where does that leave us? Is originality a myth, a relic of a bygone era? Perhaps. All art, all design, in some way builds on what came before. The greats know this. Picasso famously said, “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” But there’s a difference between borrowing to create something new and simply copying to cash in. In a world where everything is a remix, maybe the question isn’t whether something is original, but how it’s been reimagined.

It’s the human desire to riff, to take something beautiful and make it our own.

This space between homage and theft, between originality and industry, is where design lives today. The truth is, few things in design are truly “new”. After all, even the most iconic designs—the ones that shape industries, the ones that change the world—are echoes of something else. And maybe, just maybe, that’s okay.

Bang Design inspires and innovates.

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