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giving and taking credit
TEXT BY ELLEN LUPTON
Why do we create? Designers are artists, makers, and thinkers who enjoy sharing content and solving problems with other people. The late Middle English word create means “to form out of nothing.” Yet creativity never comes from nothing. We borrow materials from Mother Earth or purchase them at the art store. We collaborate with users, clients, developers, and content producers, and we soak up a flood of fonts, images, sounds, songs, tropes, trends, customs, and clichés. We tap into languages and traditions that have been stewing for centuries in the primordial soup
of culture, and we use software that predetermines countless steps in the design process. Creativity is a group endeavor. How and when can a designer claim to have authored a project, and how should we acknowledge our cocreators?
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Emerging design students sometimes feel that it’s okay to use images found on the internet in a mockup for a magazine or a website because they aren’t selling their work to clients. Yet students have many opportunities to share their work—on social media, on public portfolio sites, and in competitions. It’s a good habit to give credit for a photograph, illustration, or song that comes from another source. Many museums, online archives, and photo col- lectives offer free material for reuse. Some sites allow creators to collect a fee based on what the user wants to pay. Creative Commons copyright licenses allow content creators to make it easy for other artists
to build on what they have done without commercially exploiting them.
It’s not always possible to contact a cre- ator. When you find a quirky line drawing or vintage photo in an old book or mag- azine, the original maker may be dead or unknown. However, crediting the source (Rand-McNally World Geographic Atlas, 1972) is a way to say thanks to history and build a culture of gratitude. Giving credit
is generous. It’s an act of respect for the value of the creative process.
Taking credit for your own work can
be as important as sharing credit with others. Designers need to build up a body of work in order to grow their careers. In a collaborative setting, individual designers are often restricted about what they can say about their work. Some workers sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) that forbid them from discussing their work outside the company. In the tech indus- try, the design process is embedded in a layered process of product development and engineering, making it difficult to pinpoint individual contributions. Designer and educator Rachel Berger, working in the San Francisco Bay Area, noticed that traditional design portfolios have started to disappear. She asked around and found that many designers in the tech industry aren’t interested in showing their work publicly, since interface design often aims to disappear into the user’s experience. However, some of these designers enjoy creating zines and indie publications on the side—these more personal media are designed for sharing.
What if you are working in a studio that creates brand identities, publications, and