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I want to share with you a dirty little secret of all creative people.
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Every designer, every artist, every inventor, every musician that has ever lived has used this method to
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achieve mastery in their skill.
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This method is called The Mimic Method. You see, the beginning steps of learning any new craft is mimicking
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the experts in that field.
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So if you want to learn how to cook, you grab Gordon Ramsey's or John Oliver's cookbook and you start
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practicing some recipes.
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You don't start by inventing food from scratch.
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You start mimicking those recipes and then practising them. And once again a little bit of experience
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and a little bit more confidence in whatever recipes you have been cooking,
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then you start tweaking them a little bit. And then at some point you start reinventing and creating
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your new recipes.
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If you're learning how to play a guitar, you don't start by writing new songs.
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No, you start by mimicking other musicians, meaning you start playing their songs.
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And like every other beginner guitar player you start by learning "Wonderwall". Many beginner designers
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get themselves trapped because they think the moment they start designing, they need to start creating new
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or an original work.
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And they get discouraged when this doesn't happen.
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They think that they don't have talent for it. But they skip the most important step – mimicking the experts.
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By mimicking expert is not only you get experience and confidence, but you also practice very good habits.
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Because every good design work is full with all the good design habits that we discussed in this course.
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Be it typography, and layout, consistency, and all the tricks of whitespace, and tension, and overlapping all
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that thing is in good design work. And you're basically practising all that work while you're
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mimicking somebody and sort of copying and replicating their work abd using their work as
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an inspiration.
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And once you start creating your own original work, you already have very good design habits ingrained in you.
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Mimicking has 3 stages.
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Stage 1 is copying. It's taking someone else's work and just copying it pixel by pixel.
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It's sort of like playing somebody else's song or you cooking lasagna using a recipe.
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This is done for practice rather than for real projects.
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When you are learning by copying, you're learning a lot of hidden design decisions that were made by
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a pro.
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This is where every creative person begins,
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be it Paul McCartney or Picasso. In stage 2 you are remixing. It's taking somebody else's work and giving your
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own twist to it. Just like food recipes. You start tweaking ingredients little by little. You change
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the fonts, you use your colors, tweak the shapes a little bit.
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Now you've created something different.
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However, if you put two works together, the inspiration is clearly visible. In this stage, you can already
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practice working with real projects. In the final stage 3 now you are drawing inspiration not from
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one particular work, but more like several different works, or different styles and maybe even like trends.
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And here you add even more personal touch.
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So the final result doesn't resemble any one particular work anymore.
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And one couldn't say that it's a remix of this particular website or this particular design.
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Although sometimes you could say that there is clearly an influence of some specific style or some specific trend
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in design. There is no level beyond this something like truly original work. Because if things aren't
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really based on reality, and influenced by reality and existing styles, then it just becomes irrelevant
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and quite confusing for regular audience.
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Sort of like the bizarre high-end fashion items. Too much originality will lead to products that people
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don't understand and don't want to use.
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That doesn't mean that people don't like new things, they do.
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People do enjoy new websites that look fresh. And new fashion styles that look fresh.
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But they enjoy these things because, most of the time, they resemble something from the past in something
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existing.
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But looking at it from a very new perspective and new outlook. So it's refreshed look of something familiar.
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So the taste of the audience really matters for a particular work to be appreciated or rejected.
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The strange-looking jacket, sweater or SpongeBob's pants is unfamiliar to you and me. But it might be drawing
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inspiration from some other work. And particular audience of that show might be familiar with that inspiration.
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So they might easily understand and appreciate its beauty.
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Its hard to say that with a straight face. Also, the stages are like a volume knob. Not clear cut
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transition from one to another. But more like smooth increase of intensity, with different levels within
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each stage.
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We're going to practice all these 3 stages. But before we do that first we need to learn how to find
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the right inspiration. And base our work on that and mimic that instead of trashy ones.
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So let's do that.
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Up next.