Sampling Appropriating Borrowing Mashing Aggregating

When it comes to my personal life, and I'm sure many others' at Columbia, I do sample, and so forth, from other people's works. If I was a millionaire, if I didn't have to work forty hours a week to support myself, and if I had the time, the situation would be different.

If my life consisted of those circumstances, I would most likely create all original work. I say that in the form of I wouldn't borrow others' creative work to incorporate in my school projects, not original as in the idea because I'm not sure that's possible anymore.

For instance, in my web design class, we had to create a music website. This website (I would link it if I had it up and running, but the code is completely messed up. But maybe when I fix it I'll add it later) consists of five different genres of music. For each genre I had to create six, which includes the homepage, different designs in Adobe Photoshop. We had one week to do this. This was on top off my two other very demanding design classes as well as two other academic classes. Insanity right?

I thought so. With work, classes, other homework, the only way I was going to get it done was if I borrowed other creative work.

For example: This was a page I did for the song "Mushaboom" by Feist.
The background picture is not my own photography, but rather borrowed for educational purposes from deviantART. Like I said, if I had different circumstances, I would most likely have done some other type of photography or designing to represent the song because you feel so much more accomplished when you can really call something your own.

Another example would be my use of different fonts you can download from dafont or 1001 Free Fonts. Going back to my music website, the homepage (which I linked above) uses a downloaded font.
In the case of fonts, I am not sure that I would create my own. I'm not sure why I feel differently about fonts either. Someone still took the time to delicately and deliberately create this font and it is considered a form of art. Maybe it has to do with my lack of expertise in creating fonts, or typography. But on the other hand, both of these websites are royalty free and people who upload these amateur (yes they are amateur) typefaces know that they are basically giving away their creation probably in hopes that it will end up someone widely seen.

Going back to my first example, deviantART is not necessarily there for taking people's creations, but for visually sharing them with the art community. People who do not want their items taken can write it in their description or they put large watermarks on their artwork so people can't use them. Actually, that system is kind of like CC in terms of sometimes in the description people say yes, you can use it, but no, you can't make money off of it and so forth.

My last example is a moodboard I made for my sign symbol image class. This moodboard basically lays out what kind of mood, objects, characters, lifestyle, history and so on, I want to incorporate into my final project, which will be a flag for a imaginary nation.
All of these images where take off of googleimages, deviantART, pixdaus, and flickr.

Side note here, I finally saw the CC copyright in use, it's on the homepages of the flickr website. Interesting.

Moodboards are supposed to be just a compilation of images that you gather, so in terms of copyright laws, is that illegal? I'm not sure.

You know, I'm actually surprised at how little Columbia has talked to me, maybe others, about copyright issues. I mean, that doesn't include plagiarism in terms of writing papers, but in using images in your design projects. Until I read that fair use thing, I really didn't know that what I could be doing for school could be illegal.




















Students/Professionals, which one looks scarier?

I think when I get to my professional life, it will be different. I feel like when your designing for a company you work for, it is a necessity to make your own original work no matter how little time you have because you are representing the company. I know this might be a little one-sided and that I'm representing Columbia College, but to me it seems okay to borrow other work for school as long as, you know, I'm not parading around saying oh yeah I made all of that, which I don't.

School just seems, obviously, more like I'm learning how to do all these things at once, a profession seems like it will be more concentrated so your brain won't be all over the place; you can better manage your time and your designs.