Frankendesign – When Re-Using Old Designs Makes Sense

Do we all know a story of Frankenstein’s monster? A insane scientist attempts to emanate a vital quadruped regulating tools from a innumerable of individuals. Designers mostly have a lot in common with this classical tale, using elements from their aged designs to emanate new ones for totally opposite clients.

This of march raises a question: is it reliable to do what we like to call “Frankendesign”? When is it a good time to puncture adult aged work and repurpose it, and when should we emanate something wholly new?

Recommended Reading: 5 Ways To Monetize Your Old Designs

Check The Legalities

First, we have to state a apparent disclaimer: when a customer purchases disdainful rights to your work, that means they alone can make a decisions about where and how to imitate it. It’s what they’re profitable for, after all. So always make certain we have authorised accede to use any prior customer work that would be recognizable.

Read Also: Designers: Know Your Rights! 4 Must-Have Clauses In A Contract

If no one can commend it, afterwards it’s substantially excellent to use. To be on a protected side, make certain we possess a rights to your work. The subject of egghead skill and offered rights to pattern work can and has filled whole books, though as a side note, unless there’s a specific reason a customer needs disdainful rights, it’s substantially improved not to offer them.

Time Factor

In many art and pattern fields, reusable striking elements are called assets – a engineer creates them once, and they can be used over and over in many opposite projects. A typeface is an instance of a common 2D pattern asset. Some form engineer combined it one time, and we bought a permit to reuse it again and again.

Read Also: Designers: When To Customize Type For Logos

Another form of item is a template, or a bound combination that allows we to drop in designs in gigantic combinations, meaningful that they’re always going to demeanour good together. Templates can be grave (Adobe program customarily comes with dozens of pre-made templates that are giveaway to use), or – my favorite – simply tradition finished compositions that fit your possess character and needs.

Time constraints cause in large here. If we need, say, a tradition blueprint for a WordPress theme, and your customer has given we a parsimonious deadline, it creates clarity to simply use a template from something you’ve finished before, switching out a tangible pattern elements for new ones applicable to a project.

Dig Into That Huge Backlog

If you’ve been conceptualizing for awhile, you’ll eventually build adult an huge reserve of work, all from early drafts that were never used to full-blown projects that were killed during a final minute. Variations, revisions, that thing we did for your mom for her church’s bake sale. Whatever it is, you’ve substantially saved it.

Read Also: How Separate Portfolios For Your Creative Work May Just Help

Even if we usually pattern part-time, it’s unavoidable that we will amass many gigabytes of designs: logos, navigation buttons, tradition form and lettering, matrix illustrations, and so on. This is good for a engineer on a deadline, since it means that you don’t have to reinvent a circle any time we lay down to do a new project.

If you’re not already in a robe of cataloguing your aged designs, we would suggest removing started on that ASAP. Not usually will it assistance we find accurately a form of item we need right when we need it, it will also give we a event to investigate your aged work, rather than only toss it in a folder somewhere.

Use Old Work To Get New Ideas

That leads us to maybe a best use of aged designs: inspiration. Designers are mostly desirous by aged work they did, regulating it as impulse to emanate new work. Perhaps there was an suspicion that wasn’t suitable for that customer during a time, though that we now wish to explore. Or maybe we imitation out a prior blueprint or blueprint and use it in a mood house to uncover a new customer your suspicion process.

Another reason to investigate aged work is so that we can get improved as a designer. The some-more we inspect what we did in a past, a easier we can scold mistakes and equivocate technical errors going forward. we make it a robe to rearrange my aged work each entertain during least, browsing by for aged dogs that we can learn a new pretence or two.

What Do You Think?

Do we use “Frankendesigns” in your work? What do we consider of a practice – should designers reuse their aged work more, or less? What insights have we schooled from repurposing your aged work?

Frankendesign – When Re-Using Old Designs Makes Sense