Rant: Where is the creativity?

It's the computers industry! But with icons.

Published on October 13, 2005 By azdruid In Making Icons

First off, to the parties I mention in this post, please do not take offense to anything that I say. THIS IS NOT AN ATTACK on anyone, I am merely trying to point some trends out I have noticed on WinCustomize. Thank you.

Mormegil, thank you very much for being such an active contributor to the skinning community, and for writing those fantastic Icon-A-Day tutorials. They in particular provided a nice insight on the icon-design process which you use, and I appreciate the effort involved. However, I fear you may have done a disservice to the icon design community, here. Since your icons are so popular (and rightfully so), you have inspired many people to attempt to recreate your style. This disheartens me, seeing fellow icon artists attempting to mimic your style instead of trying to come up with something new.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:
- David Brelo's Hazard set (Link) resembles that of the Orion packs, in a way. See that key icon? and the moon one? Also, I've sure I've seen that heart, checkbox, and Start menu somewhere before.

- Halluci's Archon set (Link) IS practically Utopia with some modifications. If this wasn't listed under Halluci, I would have been ready to believe Mormegil did it himself. This is probably the best example of "Pseudo-Mormegil" here.

- yangge's Ti System (Link, although to a somewhat lesser extent, also borrows many design traits from Mormegil. The most notable here are the folders, which really do look like a Mormegil creation.

Of course, to these artists, copying Mormegil may have been their goal - in which case, congratulations guys, you've succeeded in creating clones of various quality of the most prominent icon artist on WinCustomize. Myself, I have nothing against Mormegil's style - in fact, I like it quite a lot, which is why I use the Orion icons on my desktop. Is copying the sincerest form of flattery? Quite possibly so, but it's no excuse for clones.

Comments

mormegil

on Oct 13, 2005

I have to admit that I have noticed this, however I hope it is a good thing. Yangge has been heavily influenced by me for years now, but he has never directly ripped me and he has come out with several Wonderful Icon set. I see this as a good thing. The more quality Icons out there the better. And beside it pushes me to do something different the next time. Which I might add is become harder and harder, and other Artist get better and better.

Like I said, I don’t mind the "flattery", of imitation even in the examples you gave above you see each one of these artist dose go off on there one and start adding more and more of them self as the packs grow. Next time it will be more so, and before you know it the next generation of Icon artist will be being inspired by them. I have had my share of influence, and have felt that I was just copying in the past. Its how we learn. The true mark of a mature artist is when they go off on there own. But before they can do that they need to do what works to teach themselves, I am glad I can help with that.

And beside, in a wacky way it almost as if I get to make even more Iconpack, then I actually do.

All that aside, I will say, I would love to see some more original Iconpacks, in these three examples we see some fine artist, show use your stuff, go out on a limb, and give me someone to be inspired by!

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