Design talk: Is it ok to teach other people’s tutorials?
I want to make this a regular series on my blog where I talk about controversial or debated topics in design. The first topic has to do with teaching design. In teaching design on the internet, there is bound to be overlap. Someone might unintentionally post a similar tutorial then one already on the web, but is it ever ok to teach someone else’s tutorial?
There are certain things in design that are so basic that everyone does it in the same way. For instance, I cannot tell you how many times I watched someone explain what each tool in the pathfinder panel does and things like that you cannot claim as your own. It’s when you start getting into your techniques and how you go about doing something that you start to get into that gray area where a reproduction of this tutorial by someone else could be seen as them stealing your work.
I am kind of in the middle on this subject. If you have to watch a tutorial to make a tutorial you probably shouldn’t be making it in the first place. Speaking from experience, I know how much work goes into a blog post from planning a post to when it finally gets posted and the original author should get credit for that hard work. Now that doesn’t mean that you cannot reblog other people’s tutorials. Each blogger has a different opinion on reblogging and asking permission to reblog someone’s work is always preferable, however, as long as you are giving credit to the original blogger and they are ok with you reblogging their tutorial I see no problem with it.
Don’t go taking someone’s tutorial and making it into a YouTube video thinking, “this is a video, it’s completely different” because it’s not. The last thing you want to do is anger people in the field you are trying to get into so you should always ask yourself if someone did this to me how would I feel? If the answer is horrible don’t post the tutorial.
How do you feel on this subject? Is it ever ok to teach someone else’s tutorial? What about reblogging?
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