There's always space for talent

Talking about Internet, people seems to be argue about how Internet kills the originality of the work because of the repetition of work floating all around the internet. But what if I say that Internet is a infinite plattform/ perform stage for the talents?

In this remix culture, people might struggle with the originality in terms on internet. Internet causes the repetition of a work therefore it defined as unoriginal? Or people get to expose their talent and skill  to the internet considered as original ?

Awwwards, is one of the websites which provides plattform for the web designs. The Develper Award will give ahievements for the talents who deserve recognition whether that’s optimizing for mobile, ensuring accessibility to individuals with visual or hearing impairments, creating adaptable experiences for legacy browsers, or pushing the technological boundaries without excluding the masses. This Award different from other awards. They focused on balancing innovative design with quality code, winners are recognized for setting the bar for the new foundation of the modern web. Also each Developer Award winner will get a chance invite to be profiled on Internet Explorer’s Rethink Showcase, a behind-the-scenes look at what inspired the project and how it was made. By this stage, the talents get chances to expose to the internet and to the world. It doesn't mean that things on internet are all unoriginal, what about internet is web designers' canvas for expressing their creative?

Source:
Awwwards.com, (2015). Awwwards - Website Awards - Best Web Design Trends. [online] Available at: http://www.awwwards.com/developer/ [Accessed 19 Jan. 2015].   

Copy make easier?

Copy has already existed when the technique of printing which also mean the duplication of images by means of stamps in very early times. The use of round seals for rolling an impression into clay tablets goes back to early Mesopotamian civilization before 3000 BCE, where they are the most common works of art to survive, and feature complex and beautiful images.

But what I want to talk about is copywriting, its purpose are kinda different. Copywriting is writing copy for the purpose of advertising or marketing. The copy is meant to persuade someone to take action, or influence their beliefs. Copywriters are used to help create direct mail pieces, online ads, e-mail and other Internet content or offline copywrite like ad printing. Copywriting can also appear in social media content including blog posts, tweets, and social-networking site posts.

The Internet has expanded the range of copywriting opportunities to include web content, ads, emails, blogs, social media and other forms of electronic communications. Writing for the web is very different from writing for other media, tending to be more succinct than traditional advertising.

In year 1999, the web was first taken over the website owners for profits, they don't care about how original the content is. It could be duplicate and spammy as long as it would still rank for its keyword term. Nevertheless nowadays web content must be relevant for the audience. Instead of counting the keywords in the content, count how many readers more focus on. They now more focus on the originality of the web content by using a tool called Copyscape for plagiarism checking. Also, instead of just calling the visitors to do action, they have to know how to appeal to the audience with the content. This is similar to what I'm doing now for the website project. As a Interactive Media student, I must make the content not just relevent to the title of the website but also need to consider the needs of the target audience, what the users expect to see in the website. Put content which not talid with goal achieve of the website will just lose its usability, and also if copy someone's content for personal website usage will only cause plagiarism. Therefore before start to do the content, we always plan out the site map first.    

This is the site map I done for my website content. When doing the site map, I always have to relate to the goal I set for my website.

In other contexts:
Plagiarism by students, professors, or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud. Some individuals caught plagiarizing in academic or journalistic contexts claim that they plagiarized unintentionally, by failing to include quotations or give the appropriate citation. While plagiarism in scholarship and journalism has a centuries-old history, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic text, has made the physical act of copying the work of others much easier.


Bibliography:
McCoy, J. (2013). Infographic: A Timeline History of SEO and Web Copywriting - Express Writers. [online] Express Writers. Available at: https://expresswriters.com/infographic-a-timeline-history-of-seo-and-web-copywriting/ [Accessed 19 Jan. 2015].

Susan D. Blum (2009) , My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture. Cornell University Press 240pp.
YouTube, (2015). What Does a Copywriter Do. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHuoV0LkczU [Accessed 19 Jan. 2015].

Copyright vs Copyleft

If you like games, you probably have heard or watched 'Let's Play'. But do you know Let's Play actually represented of copyright or either copyleft? 

Originality will lost its value due to the repetition of its work especially on internet therefore people always work so hard to strive for the copyright in other to protect their benefits.  Example like in case of Let's Play (a recorded video documenting a playthrough of a video game, always including commentary by the gamer) Nintendo claimed that they retain the copyright and have registered the content through YouTube's Content ID system such that they can generate ad revenue from user videos who making the Let's Play.

"Copyright inevitably pits the demands of authors and publishers to control and charge for uses of their works against the demands of consumers and users of these works for maximum access to the works at minimal or no cost." said Howard B. Abrams, Professor of Law in University of Detroit Mercy. 

We dicussed the definition of originality is the aspect of created works by as being new or novel, and is not received from others nor one copied from or based upon the work of others. But is it all original work should have their own rights?

There's a term called The threshold of originality is a concept in Anglo-American-based copyright law systems that is used to assess whether a particular work can be copyrighted. In this context, "originality" refers to "coming from someone as the originator/author", rather than "never having existed before". While works that do not meet these thresholds are not eligible for copyright protection, they may still be eligible for protection through other intellectual property laws, such as trademarks or design patents (particularly in the case of logos). So, here's our defination of originality for the law study.

While people are fighting for their property's rights, there's copyleft existed on internet, too. Copyleft, designated by (ɔ) (a backwards circled capital letter “C”) is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. Free does not necessarily mean free of cost, but free as in freely available to be modified. An early use of the word "copyleft" was in Li-Chen Wang's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC's distribution notice "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED" in June 1976, but Tiny BASIC was not distributed under any form of copyleft distribution terms, so the wordplay is the only similarity. 

Copyleft is often used in relation to software in the public domain. Copyleft licenses (for software) require that information necessary for reproducing and modifying the work must be made available to recipients of the executable. In the GNU project, their aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. So instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, they “copyleft” it. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it.The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is a form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or noncommercially. 

Let's Play has a characteristic of copyleft too where users video can share their playthrough to the public and more popular YouTube channels will sometimes receive free promotional copies of games from developers and publishers in advance of release to promote the title. Users video get to paid if their views gets a certain number but not exactly by the game itself but the celebrity like Pewdiepie. Public also can embed the videos to their website in other to modify them even videos in Youtube all stated as "Standard YouTube Licence". But as long people don't get revenue or taken without legally permission that's should be fine.

Originality sometimes occur in copyrights or copyleft, depends on how the authors or inventor distribute their work. Nevertheless, we always stick to the main concept of the originality-  the aspect of created works by as being new or novel, and is not received from others nor one copied from or based upon the work of others. 

Bibliography:

Gnu.org, (2015). What is Copyleft? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation. [online] Available at: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ [Accessed 17 Jan. 2015].

 

 Howard B. Abrams. Originality and Creativity in Copyright Law. Vol. 55: No. 2. [online] Available at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4136&context=lcp [Accessed 17 January 2015]

Rose, M. (2015). Pay for Play: The ethics of paying for YouTuber coverage. [online] Gamasutra.com. Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/219671/Pay_for_Play_The_ethics_of_paying_for_YouTuber_coverage.php [Accessed 17 Jan. 2015].

Polygon, (2013). Nintendo claims ad revenue on user-generated YouTube videos. [online] Available at: http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/16/4336114/nintendo-claims-ad-revenue-on-user-generated-youtube-videos [Accessed 17 Jan. 2015].

 

Crowdsourcing vs Originality

As Gerry Beegan and Paul Atkinson (2008) argue, “Even when the relationship is one of repudiation. Professional practice defines itself by its distance from the unschooled practitioner ... At the same time, the professional is often a categorization that amateur designers reject, as a limitation to their creativity or originality”. Crowdsourcing has been a controversy subject among the designers.

The word crowdsourcing, a contraction popularized by Jeff Howe in 2006. The word is used to describe a wide group of activities that take on different forms, ranging from the digitization of archives and graphic design to proposing innovative concepts and complex problem solving.

Internet provides a particularly good venue for crowdsourcing since individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they are not being physically judged or scrutinized and thus can feel more comfortable sharing. With explicit crowdsourcing, users can evaluate particular items like books or webpages, or share by posting products or items. Users can also build artifacts by providing information and editing other people's work.

Nevertheless crowdsourcing challengged the originality in design. People can edit other's work and share to their blog, and this occur the happenning of repetition in work. It lose the value of originality not only in this way but site like Awwwards are project–focused, meaning crowdsourcing occurs because multiple people contribute to specific design challenges/projects and creatives compete against one another to be awarded the winning design. We can see the designs of the websites are typically the same no matter how we search in the categories.

Crowdsourcing is benefits to the big companies such as Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. Or in game development like Foldit which is aimed to discover native protein structures faster, through a combination of crowdsourcing and distributed computing. Virtual interaction and gamification were added, creating a unique and innovative project environment with the potential to greatly assist the cause. However, originality in crowdsourcing has a very low possibility as we can say that designers have limitation to their creativity as they work as groups for their client's needs. 


Source:
Burke, A. (2011). Games That Solve Real Problems: Crowdsourcing Biochemistry. [online] Forbes. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/10/27/games-that-solve-real-problems-crowdsourcing-biochemistry/ [Accessed 17 Jan. 2015].

MM Wanderley, D Birnbaum, J Malloch (2006). New Interfaces For Musical Expression. IRCAM – Centre Pompidou. p. 180.

Gerry Beegan and Paul Atkinson, 2008. 'Professionalism, amateurism and the boundaries of design,' Journal of Design History, volume 21, number 4, pp. 305–313. [online]  Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epn037 [Accessed 17 Jan. 2015].

Hoek, J (2014) 'An overview of the success factors and challenges
of the broadcast search process'. Crowdsourcing for Innovation. pp.7. [online]  Available at: https:// http://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/295706/BachelorThesisJustinHoekFinal-1.pdf?sequence=2  [Accessed 17 Jan. 2015].

Internet: Limit Imagination?

"Internet limits for innovation and imagination because of the constraint on the screen." said Milton Glaser, but what he really worries is that technology is removing the most powerful instrument of art from the equation: pencil and paper. He said that the art pieces have more potentially expression and free flow when work with pencil and paper while internet is just one material and it is being so dominated in term of its powerful tool that can increase the amount of repetition of work. Therefore there're many work on internet we already see before.

As a student of interactive multimedia design, I can see how's the experience of seeing the same design and layout on the internet or even we also doing the same thing. Nevertheless it's doesn't mean that create repetition of work is considered has no imagination and creativity. Whenever we start a project, we have to sketch and plan it out first. For example before I start doing my website, I have to consider many layout possibilities for the users and I sketch it all out. When everything is confirmed like the design, the layout, the content, I start to digitalize them. We can be skilled enough by starting off from a PC or MAC screen but for corporate works, and purpose-built quality work, even if everything seems to be based on the idea that a great web-page capitalizes on a corporate image, the ideas are best kept first on paper, then translated to a digital context. To enhance the usability of a website, we should keep the consistency of the layout or wireframe, us web designers can always create something creative from the limitation of the layout as HTML can embed scripts written in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML Web pages. Default characteristics for every item of HTML markup are defined in the browser, and these characteristics can be altered or enhanced by the web page designer's additional use of CSS. Therefore, there's still web designers can create exordinary work instead of restricted by the limitation of the layout.

No matter is in traditional way or digitally way to create a work neither non-formal tranning nor formal tranning , we always start from a very basic fundamental- drawing fundamental. This is the reason we spend a foundation year to learn drawing and colour studies before we enter degree level. We learn the right judgement for our design, and we always make a balance throughout the process.  

Source:

YouTube, (2015). Is the Internet Ruining Design?. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2SccqDvVCg [Accessed 16 Jan. 2015]. 

Is it the matter? Originality in Web Design

As a multimedia designer, we have consider many things and plan everything before the final piece launched to the public. I recently have done with my website project so it’s still fresh in my head. I’m share a bit of making of a website. Before step into visualizing the website, I have to set my goal first, like the purpose of making this website and my target users, because every design has its own purpose and every design needs audience to appreciate. Therefore in my case I build for photography lovers (nearly like a sharing sites) and I used skeuomorphic design to bring out the feel of the specific subject I chose (website: http://madrabbit-art.com/). I never made a site like this before so I did some research for the content, element, layout structure, design which I should consider put in my website, like Flickr. I don’t think I can make a good photography site without any mistake should happen like wrong content and layout for photography users, without some online research. If people say that my work looks familiar with some sites, I can guarantee them, it’s obviously taken from others. Nevertheless, I didn’t copy it pixel by pixel, I just took some element from different places and ‘mash up’ into something new and make it into my own piece. I remember my lecturer said to us, always create new things from old element.

Originality? Seems never happen to me.

Ezequiel Bruni is a Canadian web designer. He said that originality doesn’t really a matter, at least in web design. There’s still many outstanding web design out there and there’s still pioneer or innovator there to lead us. Nevertheless, we still doing the same boring layout structure and design.
He has experiences of web design and he states out some points that make us as web designer to think about it.

1.    Clients don’t care. They might say they value originality, but they don’t. They want their website to be effective in achieving its intended goal. Whether they’re selling a product, advertising a service, or attempting to influence opinions, that is all they want. They don’t care if other people’s websites looks similar to theirs.

2.    Users don’t care. Users probably care even less about design originality than clients. They just want to do what they came for, no more, and no less.

3.    We shouldn’t care too much, because we’re not artists. Design is not art. It’s science. We design websites to sell things. The results of our work, that of selling things, must be demonstrable and repeatable, just like the result of any other experiment.

Innovation, improvement, and originality are good things in our profession, of course, provided they make us more effective. Being different for the mere sake of not being the same is how we ended up with entire subcultures of teens who all dress the same in an attempt to be different.

What matters, if not originality?

I am not saying that we should never experiment or we have to be an “industry leader” before we try new things. I’m saying that we should not obsess over originality in the field of design. Sometimes people who aren’t satisfied until they’ve tried something new and novel, to the detriment of their actual paying work.
Originality is in the details, anyway. It has to be. As long as we’re constrained to two-dimensional screens, we’ll be rather limited in what we can reasonably design. We use imagery and content we (or our clients) create. We seek novelty and original thought, not in the pixels on the screen, but in the people those pixels connect us to.

Source:

Medium, (2014). Does Originality Even Matter in Design?. [online] Available at: https://medium.com/@ezequielbruni/does-originality-even-matter-in-design-728be406b15 [Accessed 27 Dec. 2014].

     

Steal, Make Sense

I’m an Interactive Media Design student, lately I finished a UNESCO World Heritage website. Website: http://madrabbit-art.com/

The idea of my website is ‘stole’ from some retro art style of website. Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon gives me an idea of being a great artist (or a designer) is ‘stealing’ from others idea and transform and combine it into self work. “Inspiration” in a term is a very broad way to describe it, hence, I can say that I inspire by a design instead of saying I copy from a design. A good designer will copy from other design but a great designer will ‘steal’ it what he/she wants. He also said that there is no such thing of completely original as we live in a remix culture, example like the idea of collage art.

                                                  The home page of my website

                              These are the references I took for my website design

 Collage art itself is not an original things, it also took element from different places and placement played by the artist. What’s really makes it original is something new to the public, but after the repetition of the work, it loses its originality.

Our lecturer told us to find references from other designs, do mood board and cites all the sources we used, before step into designing stage. As a professional designer, we can’t skip these progresses of making a website. We learn techniques and mistakes by doing research then we can do a better design. 

Source:

YouTube, (2014). Steal Like An Artist: Austin Kleon at TEDxKC. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oww7oB9rjgw [Accessed 27 Dec. 2014].