You're reading a post titled “Tracer.” from the archives of Big Contrarian. It was originally published on April 9th, 2008 at 08:52 PM. If you enjoy it, you should subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, or its Twitter page.

Bare with me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Unnecessary Background.

In a past life, I fancied myself an artist. Not a real one mind you: I rarely painted, had no insight into the struggle of man with his inner consumer, and gave a shit about expression. I preferred the subject of large men and women in spandex, often with even larger swords, pony tails and the always fashionable trench coat. If I was feeling ambitious, some type of city skyline would be included (but only if the character needed something to perch from).

Lacking any understanding of real art, I learned to draw the same way I’d learned to walk, urinate, cook and groom myself. I watched others and tried to copy them as best I could. I began the way most kids I knew began. Tracing paper and #2 pencils. At the delicate age of nine or so, I’d spend hours intricately following the lines of Jim Lee, or Adam Kubert. I’d change one or two things here and there, sure, but by and large, this was a xeroxing operation. And it was how I assumed every other artist worked. The idea that someone could, from nothing, produce a cover of the quality of X-men #1 was simply amazing to me.

Eventually, I learned that what many comic artists did was to copy photographs. Not only that but according to an incredibly insulted artist working a thankless table job at a midwestern comic-con, it wasn’t called copying. It was called reference. He was using a photograph for reference. Tomato, tomatoe I thought. He traced, I traced. He just traced real life.

Taking his advice to heart, I switched to photographs, and then to drawing still life and eventually to drawing sans any immediate reference material. I studied the tomes on things like perspective and anatomy. I was never beyond mediocre in talent, but that was a good deal better than most kids my age, and I took pride in it. When someone wanted an awesome cover for their Trapper Keeper, I was the guy on the play ground with the sketchbook and pencil more than willing to oblige.

In 7th grade, I got my first taste of competition. Randy Shanks (maybe) was becoming widely regarded as the superior artist in my class. And dear god, was he. His sketches were highly-stylized and infinitely more animated. There was a delicate understanding of female proportion and a sense of whimsy to the face. I tried in vain to replicate, but I never got even close to his level of talent.

A few weeks went by, and frustrated as I was, I started hounding him to draw things for me. I wanted to watch him work. I figured maybe there was some trick he was doing that I wasn’t. I knew I was lazy about roughs, and I never bothered doing real light studies. Maybe there was just some simple technique he used up front. Some magic point A to start from. After much harassing, and a promise of money exchanging hands, he agreed.

The little prick was just tracing everything from Street Fighter II manuals and manga collections! I’d never been exposed to manga before, and didn’t own a Super Nintendo, so I never would’ve sussed it out on my own. It’d never occurred to me that was even a possibility. All of his sketches were done on cheap Xerox paper, not the fancy tracing paper I’d been used to seeing. Without actually seeing his reference material, and seen him work, I’d have gone my entire life assuming he was the superior artist. It would’ve deadened me inside, eventually turning me into a shell of an artist. Maybe a High School art teacher (the most tortured, bitter people you will ever meet).

Incensed, I grabbed the manual and ran off. First chance I got I explained, loudly, to an entire class, and in very dramatic words for an eleven-year old, that his entire talent was nothing by a ruse! He was cheating! He was a disgrace to artists! Blah blah blah blah.

To my shock, not a one of my classmates gave a fuck. To them, the tracing took just as much talent as the not-tracing-anymore. What was the difference they wondered? His work looked better. They couldn’t trace that well. Randy was still the better artist to everyone but me.

Oh! The sweet injustice of it all! Here I was a struggling, serious artist, who’d spent so long learning all the fundamentals and practicing angle after angle, composition after composition, searching and reading every more obscure books on art theory and storytelling … and I was being outdone by some two-bit tracer?!

Good lord was I a self-righteous brat.

You Grows Up And You Grows Up And You …

Of course, Randy had done nothing wrong. He was learning to draw the same way I had learned. By copying things that appealed to him. Over time, just as I had, he moved away from copying and produced work on his own. By ninth grade, he was actually a good deal better than me. Subjectively, of course. A few folks preferred my style to his, but I still think they were loons.

Randy has always stuck in mind as a lesson in humility. The idea that one should never take one’s work too seriously. All the effort I wasted being jealous, angry and bitter at Randy didn’t serve me much good. It didn’t improve my skills as an artist. It didn’t make me look any better to my classmates. It certainly didn’t make Randy worse. Randy kept on keeping on, and the competition he offered actually improved my own work. It forced me to seek out new sources, new ideas. Once I let go of the self-righteousness about plagiarizing, I was able to learn from the experience.

It’s also made me incredibly weary of folks who are just a little too self-righteous about theft. Folks who ignore the subjective nature of it, who paint it as a black-and-white issue, and who vilify the thief in terms a little too harsh always strike me as slightly ridiculous and inevitably hypocritical.

Multiplayer Notepad.

The ignition for all this was a relatively simple statement from Alan Jacobs, twittered to John Gruber which was apparently, “Exactamondo”:

@gruber One thing we know about the people who defend the Google ripoff of 37S: they’ve never made anything themselves (and probably won’t).

Alan is referencing the recent blog-a-controversy of HuddleChat. Released simultaneously with Google’s App Engine, HuddleChat was a quickly thrown together technology demo that bore an eery resemblance to 37signal’s Campfire application.

The first I read about it was in Gruber’s Linked List. Gruber’s main argument at the time seemed to be that Google, a large successful company, had copied the work of 37signals, an independent developer, and that the offense was particularly egregious because they were attempting to court independent developers:

Even if you think it’s OK to copy someone else’s application feature-for-feature, the big fear for developers with something like Google App Engine is that you’re trusting Google with all of your source code. Why should small indie web developers trust Google when the first example app is a Google rip-off of a small indie web app?

It’s a stance I see more often than not in web design circles. Independent developers can mimic applications from the big guys, but the big guys can never mimic the independent. Unless you’re Apple, in which case logic can be twisted to make what you did OK.

Over the ensuing day, the logic seemed to change to be a general distaste with copying. Which, given his past defense of Apple doing much the same thing, seemed disconnected. He, and numerous others, are of the mind that HuddleChat was a feature-for-feature, layout-for-layout copy of Campfire, and that it was somehow wrong of Google to do it.

Personally, the only time I’ll call outright theft on any product is if code or images are directly copied. That’s not drawing from reference, it’s not even tracing, it’s Xeroxing. It’s the laziest possible way to reach a result, and especially offensive as the person doing it benefits from it monetarily without simultaneously learning from the act.

In cases like HuddleChat, I tend to err on the side of competition. It’s understood that the idea of a web-based chat application isn’t owned by 37signals or anyone else and that anyone should be free to implement something similar, but I also believe that general layout ideas are no more rightfully owned by a party than the idea is. HuddleChat is a particularly good example, in that it wasn’t a 100% copy. Several layout elements were moved, and in the case of the “Upload File” placement, were actually moved for the better. Some creative work went into the HuddleChat layout.

If the stance is that HuddleChat was not just a layout copy, but a feature-for-feature copy, then you have to really examine the feature set and ask yourself just how special it is. 37Signals own adherence to the less-is-more aesthetic means that Campfire contains the bare minimum of features one would expect from a web chatting application. If I were to sit down today and draw up specifications, having never seen Campfire, I don’t know that I wouldn’t come out with a product eerily similar to Campfire. I don’t know that anyone would. I’m sure my layout would have been different, since I have a very different take on application design than 37signals, but having seen Campfire once, what they’ve done is relatively obvious and works quite well. I don’t know if I could improve on it.

Perhaps it’s the combination of the two that bothers folks. If HuddleChat had a radically different layout, but the same features, I don’t imagine there would have been near the same outcry. However, if it’d looked the same, but had included some whiz-bang-spinner features, or a different take on some core feature, I still feel like there would have been an outcry. Feature replication is by and large seen as justified competition. So I don’t really buy the combination argument. I firmly believe that it was the replication of the basic layout that bothered folks the most.

But once we start trying to lay claim to layouts, or color schemes, or particular graphic effects, we start walking down a very steep hill wherein most of the work out there, especially design, has to be labeled as theft. Best practices ripple through our industry, and it’s impossible to be 100% unique 100% of the time. And while, yes, it’s important to strive to try be, its important that you pick the right battles. As Ives has said, “Being different is easy. Being better is very, very hard.”

So You’ve Never Made Anything …

I’ve worked as a developer/designer now for nearly 10 years. I’ve spent months perfecting application designs, stayed up late at night fretting over the smallest details of copy and the minor differences between #FFCC00 and #FFFF00. I’ve had a few designs stolen, even had some code stolen. I’m not saying this to brag, I just realize most folks have never heard of me, so my experience in the industry may not be apparent.

I’m not defending HuddleChat out of some ridiculous misunderstanding of the work that goes into creating a great application. I fully understand that the hard work of designing a decent Web chat application was really done by 37signals, and that the developers behind HuddleChat more or less stood on their shoulders.

I’m just saying that maybe that’s OK. I believe that in a competitive marketplace, and in a field as derivative as design, copying is not only going to happen, but to some degree it has to. I believe that the line between inspiration and replication is too subjective and far too thin to ever be discussed as an absolute. I believe that outside of the obvious outright theft of code, we should be humble about theft and forgiving. And even then, I’d probably let most code thieves go with a warning and a firm handshake.

More so, I believe it is patently hypocritical to hold any company to different standards based on their size or who they are. Google’s developers are not under some special code of honor to never, ever replicate the work of an independent developer. They, like everyone else, should be free to play with any idea they’d like, whether it be an application idea, a layout, or design element. And if it just so happens that they played with your idea, and ended up releasing something, you should try to be more mature than this.

You can spend your time bemoaning the existence of Randy Sparks, or you can beat him.

Aftermath

Once the controversy spread, Google removed the HuddleChat application and replaced it with a brief apology. It was more than likely the right decision. The big news wasn’t HuddleChat. HuddleChat was a technology demo. A proof of concept. It was not the story, and by leaving it up, the Google App Team was basically seeding the news coverage to the HuddleChat controversy. Of course, some folks (cough) are still going to be drawn to long-winded posts about the application, but at least their team can focus on other issues. Hopefully, some prankster takes the time to recreate it. It’d be me, but I have other ideas I’d like to play with.