I’m working on a redesign – my first for about six months. I’m feeling a combination of delighted and horrified with its progress. I was looking around at a few sites that really caught my attention and screen-capping them, grabbing components of them in Photoshop and mucking around with them on my screen. One component really stuck in my head and became the focus of everything I did after that point, and has since dictated colour schemes, and basic page structure. The mock-up I’m moving towards looks very little like the original site as a whole, but has elements that are clearly similar. This worries me.
The thing is, initially I was just mucking around with some stuff to see what ideas came to me, and now I am loath to give up on the work I have done and throw the product of that work in the Trash. It’s less about copyright for me than it is about creating something by myself, for myself. I’m a bit torn. Opinions?