Steal like a product designer
Like an artist, steal from the world around you.
Most great ideas don’t start from scratch. They start from something that already works. A familiar shape, a clever pattern, a mechanic borrowed from another field. Product design, at its best, is really a remix. The job isn’t to invent in a vacuum. It’s to pull from proven solutions, reshape them, and make them fit a new problem, brand, or moment.
So if “stealing” sounds dirty, maybe that’s the point. The truth is that every designer already does it, whether they admit it or not. The real question is not if you steal, but how. Do you copy in ways that make your work generic, or do you borrow in ways that make it feel fresh and inevitable?
The phrase “steal like a product designer” is borrowed itself. It comes from Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist, where he makes the case that originality is usually a remix of what came before. Designers, just like artists, can take that principle and apply it to their craft.
Why stealing actually helps
Originality is usually a mashup of existing things. Games gave us streaks and habit loops. Retail gave us personalization. Manufacturing gave us kanban. Finance gave us dashboards. None of these patterns were created in a vacuum. They were lifted and transformed.
When you steal with intent, you lower friction by giving people patterns they already know. You reduce risk because you are building on proven ideas. You create novelty, not by starting from scratch, but by recombining familiar parts in new ways. And you move faster, which frees up your energy for the details that make your product unmistakably yours.
This is not about copying screens or colors. It is about studying the mechanics behind them, then reimagining those mechanics for your context.
Where teams usually mess it up
A lot of teams do this poorly. Here are the common traps:
They copy the surface (visual style) without understanding the structure (why it works).
They forget the ethics, lifting without transformation or credit.
They all copy the same “best practices,” which leads to sameness.
They drop patterns into the wrong context, where they don’t fit the user or moment.
Avoiding those mistakes is the difference between good theft and lazy cloning.
Good theft vs. bad theft
Good theft is about mechanisms and intent. Bad theft is about shortcuts and surfaces.
When you borrow with the right intent, you aim to learn and elevate. You focus on principles and mental models, not pixels or colors. You reframe, recombine, and simplify rather than cloning directly. You credit your sources, at least internally, and you tune the pattern for your user, moment, and context. The result feels both familiar and new.
Bad theft takes the opposite path. It treats copying as a shortcut, focuses on visual style over structure, hides sources, and pastes patterns into mismatched flows. It leads to work that feels generic, derivative, or even risky.
The goal is never originality for its own sake. The goal is originality through transformation.
The remix ladder
Think of remixing as levels.
0 — Clone: Copy the look-and-feel. (Don’t do this.)
1 — Imitate: Change the nouns, keep the same mechanic.
2 — Adapt: Adjust the timing or pacing to your context.
3 — Recombine: Blend two or more mechanics into something new.
4 — Transcend: Your remix becomes the new reference point.
Aim for level 3 or higher.
Staying out of the sameness trap
Borrowing can create sameness if you are not careful. The way out is to design with intentional divergence. Define a brand grammar with your own voice, motion, and materials. Constrain yourself in ways that force originality, such as designing for one-hand use or removing empty states entirely. Solve edge cases your competitors ignore, like offline use or multi-profile support. And tell a story around your patterns, even giving them names.
Copycats might imitate your interface, but they rarely imitate your story.
Closing thought
The point of design theft is not to ask, “Did we think of it first?” The better question is, “Did we make it ours, and did it serve our users well?”
That was Kleon’s point in Steal Like an Artist. The value of creative work lies in how you transform what you borrow and how you make it unmistakably yours. If artists can steal with taste and intention, so can product designers.
So steal like a designer. Do it with care, with ethics, and with intent. That is how you ship work that feels both familiar and new.