It’s your first day at a new job, and your new boss comes up and tells you to come up with a redesign.  “Here’s what we want,” he says as he hands you a pile of papers.  A quick glance at the material informs you that it is a number of printouts from one website.  Upon further questioning, you begin to understand that your new job is to (at least in the eyes of management) be “inspired by” a major competitors site.  Add in the fact that bills are beginning to pile up and leaving this job is not an option for the immediate.  What do you do?

Let’s add in the fact that this isn’t your first time doing the web game.  It’s a good bet (at least in my experience) that you’ve never been asked to copy completely a design.  Now, you financial situation has forced you to lower a rate that even a month ago seemed too low.  How do you as the designer gently explain that what is being asked for is theft?  How do you explain that, in order to do what they are requesting, you would have to give up on ethical concerns?

The answer (at least in this situation) is to take a long view.  Tell your boss that the redesign shouldn’t be focused on “how it looks,” but “how it presents data.”  Good advice under most circumstances, but in a situation like this, it allows for the visual design to be looked at once removed.  Now, the questions become, “how should I include this?”  These are more effective questions.

But, this episode causes me to wonder.  Does the expectations change so completely once the cost drops below a certain level?  Are companies getting a design-as-theft and not questioning it?  Is it standard practice?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Writings, programming, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.