June 30th, 2024

Monkey See, Monkey Do

I feel like there’s a difficult trade-off in creative spaces involving inspiration and blatant biting. For a lot of people, there’s a complex needle to thread between being inspired by something and just completely ripping it off. If done properly, it’s called “innovation”, and if done poorly, it’s called “stealing”. It’s a bit comical because the line between the two is such a continuum, and the penalty for the latter is so high that it’s a wonder any new ideas exist in the world at all.

I think a lot of people who aren’t organically creative thinkers find it difficult to not just bite everything they think is cool. You should be inspired and influenced by the world around you, but you also need to have a core, unique aesthetic. It's imperative to figure out a way to draw inspiration from something and strictly use it as a model to set your own work on a similar path.

So much of being inspired by something is about finding the right distance to keep from it. The key being to not let someone's work infect your own. However, most people will disregard this and completely bite the source, resulting in their work becoming a terrible derivative of what they were initially inspired by.

The pushback from the creative process is so strong that I think the best way to navigate these waters isn’t by being a reflection of the inspiration, but by using it as a base to create somewhat of an antithesis from it.