Am I inspired, or stealing?
This past month, I've almost entirely replaced social media and mindless scrolling with surfing the web old-school style: reading blogs here on Bearblog and on the indie web in general. It's been a lot of fun! One of my favorite parts of reading blogs is seeing how the blogger expresses themselves in their style, both in their visual aesthetic and in their writing.
But all this exploration has presented a bit of an issue. I'm still exploring my style. I'm new to this whole blogging thing, so I'm still figuring out what I want to blog about, how I want my blog to look, the tone, etc. The problem is that sometimes I come across blogs1 that are so cool and make me want tont to steal or emulate specific elements. It could be a font, a color palette, or a stylistic choice.
As I feel these kleptomaniac urges, I wonder if it's okay for me to copy an element? Is that inspiration? Or is that theft? I'm sure it matters how big the element I want to copy is: if I steal a blog's entire aesthetic, style, and tone, that would be clearly bad. But maybe copying one element would be okay?
I wonder if the blogs that I appreciate built their blog by stealing/being inspired by many different sources. Or did they just generate these ideas or designs internally? If so, how do I learn to generate original ideas?
Reader, I have questions. Do you have answers? Lmk.
I have such a blog crush on this one blogger. They are just so cool. If I could, I would steal every aspect of their blog. But, what I'm really getting at, I guess, is that I want to be someone who could produce something as cool as that.↩