Prototyping

(MUSIC PLAYS)

KIRBY CLARK: Prototyping is extremely important. I’ve come up against these issues time and time again, where you come up with an idea and you think it’s going to act a certain way, then you actually put it into reality and you come across problems. So prototyping is very important because you need to ensure that you’re not going to have problems when you actually put that idea out to market or you give that idea to the client. It’s sometimes a common view on prototyping and some other parts of the design process as well from clients that are very financially motivated.

It’s very important to use prototyping to ensure that you iron out all of the kinks before your design goes out to market or before your design gets built. So the way that you sort of approach that with a client, if they do see that as a bottleneck is saying, Hey, we’re actually going through coming up against all of the problems right now while we’re in a factory and putting something together rather than when you’re actually serving clients when that would very much affect your income and your profit, and your reputation, so prototyping is very important.

FREDDIE OST: For us, we’ve been replicated many times. A lot of people have copied our design. None of these times, we have suffered, they suffered every time, and in the…also in the sense that they, didn’t do anything different with it. Because everything today is a remix. Everything comes from something else. Every idea today comes from an idea. You can never do something and say that, this is my own idea completely because it’s not. But then it’s how you take on under inspiration, and then use that as inspiration instead of copying, that’s a big thing that we don’t think that there’s a way of protecting it.

Unless, if you do a product, you can take a patent or whatever, and protect your brand or whatever you would do this brand protections. But as projects and the signs, we’re doing or films, There’s no real way you can protect it. But most of the time when someone blatantly copy someone, it will be called out immediately.

KIRBY CLARK: Look in terms of IP protection and having ideas stolen or replicated, in the design industry, it does happen, and it has happened to me a few times. First of all, imitation is the finest form of flattery. That’s when you know you’re onto something good, is when someone wants to copy you. So it is going to happen you will come up against it. But second of all, if it does happen in a way where someone’s actually completely taking your idea before you put it out to market and put it out themselves. You can actually make sure that you do have just track the progress of your design.

So keep files, keep your documentation, keep your progress, have copyrights on everything. Look, it’s going to happen, and sometimes it’s not worth the fight. Sometimes it’s kind of just nice to know that someone thinks you’re great and they want to copy what you’re doing, and just keep doing what you’re doing. But there are some measurements that you can take to sort of, I guess limit that happening and that would be making sure that your name is on everything that you do, and making sure that you have a really good brand presence.