Art Is For Everyone
Creativity is the lifeblood of what I do as a human being making me feel alive and hopefully creating a better world in the process. As a designer, I’m well versed in the notion of keeping your creative endeavors locked down via paywalls or unavailable for other creatives through copyrights. I get the idea behind this as for many artists, their designs are their livelihood, and if they lose those, they lose everything. I’ve always seen my designs as not something to keep in my vault, but to share freely with the world. Yes, I have some of my artwork available for sale, but it is all copyright free and available for everyone to utilize. There are many reasons why I do this, and I'd like to cover a few of those below.
Everything has already been done
When I finish a design, I have a hard time saying its an original piece, for what I just made has been influenced by something else. Without this inspirational process though, I wouldn't be much of a designer. That ’s why I love the notion of sharing my ideas and designs. If I can help make this inspirational process easier for someone else, there is no greater gift I can give.
Don't worry about people stealing your work
With any opportunity comes some sort of risk, and for many artists, their biggest fear is someone stealing their work or making money from it. While I don’t condone this behavior, I don’t think it's my place to police it and is certainly not a reason for me to keep my designs under lock and key. If someone does in fact ‘steal’ my work, I know I’m finally starting to make quality pieces which, in a sense is quite flattering. I love this quote by Jeffery Zeldman, “Don’t worry about people stealing your work. Worry about the day they stop.”
Make the world a better place
In 2014, Telsa Motors opened all of its patents to the world, effectively making it free for other companies to use its technology. Their reasoning was simple, to further support their mission of accelerating the creation of sustainable transport. This has created a big stir in the industry and a long list of supporters and critics. Whether or not other companies have taken Telsa up on the offer has yet to be seen, but it sure has helped to jumpstart the auto industry in creating electric vehicles. This has inevitably helped Tesla's mission, creating more buzz and more demand for sustainable transport. The spirit of an openly shared marketplace does help create a better world for everyone. This is certainly true with the creative community as royalty-free content sites are popping up all other the internet. I use and contribute to this community and I can't tell you how many times these resources have helped me design better pieces.
As more artists open up to the idea of sharing their creativity with the community, I'm very optimistic that this will create even better artwork for the world.