Assembly Required.

Every great designer starts by copying. Not because they lack ideas, but because they’re learning to see.

As a kid, I wasn’t trying to be an artist. I just wanted to be someone who could really draw anything. Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man, a monster truck with Spider-Man in it. But drawing a monster truck in perspective? Those angled tires nearly broke me.

So I started tracing. No one told me to. It just made sense.

The more I traced, the more I saw. Shapes turned into structure. Curves into intention. Eventually, I didn’t need the original. I could build from what I understood.

That instinct never left.

In college, learning Illustrator, I made fake concert posters for lineups that would never exist (Bob Marley, Modest Mouse, and Talib Kweli on the same bill). I mimicked the greats. Studied fonts, layouts, the invisible grid underneath it all. I copied until I understood. That’s when the good work started.

Now I’m a designer at an agency where we create visual identities that actually stick—and that process still starts the same way: with influence. If I’m designing a bird logo, I’m not the first to try it. But I still look around. Not to steal, but to learn.

What’s been done? What’s overdone? What still works?

Because the truth is: total originality is a myth. We’re swimming in a shared visual language, and overlap is inevitable. The job isn’t to avoid that, it’s to understand it deeply enough to make something new out of it.

That’s what good design is. Not a rejection of what’s been done, but a remix, a refinement, a reframe. Tracing isn’t cheating, it’s training.

Just don’t stop at the tracing paper.

Want to see how we build beyond the reference? Check out how we reimagined an entire credit union’s identity by pulling the right threads and discarding the rest.