Crabs, Creativity, and the Endless Cycle of Imitation

On a recent walk with a friend, we found ourselves musing on nature and creative direction.

As we wandered through the city, the conversation turned to her time studying biomedical engineering. She recalled a particularly interesting lesson on carcinisation—the evolutionary process where different species independently evolve into crab-like forms.

This felt oddly familiar. Deep in the weeds of designing Daybreak Studio’s next website, her lesson took on a new form. It mirrored the way our industry is evolving to echo itself, each design iteration mirroring the last, until all that’s left are variations of the same.

We’re in a sea of crabs. The abstract floating UI elements are our claws, reaching but never quite grasping meaning. The centered layouts, featuring the inevitable dashboard preview, form the hard shell—structured, predictable. And then there are the legs—overused shadows, glows, and effects, moving but never quite going anywhere new.

Not every mutation survives. Some endure. Others fade—just another iteration in an endless cycle of replication.

When inspiration becomes imitation

With an increasing reliance on algorithmic insights, the creative process is oversimplified.

Inspiration is reduced to screenshotting and pasting landing pages into Figma. Trends are re-recycled patterns, borrowed and diluted from a shallow pool of visual ideas.

The tech design landscape resembles a pendulum, oscillating between originality and imitation. As it swings backward, a new aesthetic takes shape; as it swings forward, companies strip away the surface-level elements from the latest viral example—often missing the deeper principles that made it work in the first place. Caught in this cycle of surface-level mimicry, products start to lose their own voice, defaulting to what is familiar rather than what is true to them.

Just as every organism has its own unique traits and ecological role, every well-designed product has its own specific needs and environment to thrive in.

Looking at companies that excel at design, you may wonder where they draw their influence from. Just as every organism has its own unique traits and ecological role, every well-designed product has its own specific needs and environment to thrive in.

You’re not Stripe, and you’re not Ramp. If you’re building an AI companion product, why turn to B2B platforms for inspiration? You cannot make a crab walk straight — why forcefully adapt features that aren’t designed for your specific environment?

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, a source of inspiration for the Stripe.dev website

The Daylight DC-1 tablet atop sunlit grass

Imagery from Superpower's custom shoot, a nod to the spinal cord used as a central motif in the design process

Physical newspapers distributed and read at the Toronto Stripe Press event

A great source is rooted in purpose.

If we view inspiration as mental stimulation, we should start seeking it beyond our usual sources. And if we view it as reference, we should turn inward—toward the product’s vision and the audience it serves—and let that guide the outcome.

Take the Stripe.dev website as an example. In a thread breaking down the design process, Devin, one of its creators, revealed that its inspiration came from deeper references: the Yale library and the Wellington family estate. “Relatively simple on the outside, with more surprising details the longer you explore—each detail serves a specific purpose,” Devin explains. This serves as a reminder that great inspiration isn’t limited to a specific medium; we might truly find what we are seeking outside what we have come to know. In this case, it emerged from physical spaces—steeped in history, rich with meaning, and brimming with possibilities.

Anchored in the physicality of the body, the final design feels more grounded and alive.

Similarly, Stripe Press—their publishing house—draws on the essence of print media to shape its digital form. Their website for Poor Charlie’s Almanack taps into the book's witty roots, also found in its successor Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. With its tight columns, earthy tones, and precise choice of Cardinal Fruit as a serif, they pay a meaningful homage to the visual language of almanacs and the rational minimalistic principles Charlie Munger stood for.

For a startup example, consider Daylight Computer’s landing page. To me, it evokes the serene experience of reading beneath a tree, where sunlight filters through rustling leaves. The warm hues, organic illustrations, and inviting art direction perfectly capture that cozy, natural feeling—a perfect match for their brand, and a beautiful reflection of their physical product.

At our studio, we also put the same principles into practice. For Superpower’s landing page, we turned to the human body—something deeply tangible and real—to guide its form and structure. Just as our brand identity drew from human anatomy, the spinal cord informed the website’s visual language and layout. Anchored in the physicality of the body, the final design feels more grounded and alive.

The website you’re inclined to screenshot feels stimulating because it’s built on strong foundations. Rather than scavenging it for parts, seek out your own source of creative nourishment— something bespoke that fuels you.

Hands on the subway, captured by Jake Dow Smith

A stream rushes over an assortment of rocks, captured by RiverWind-Photography

Guests seated and looking at a cave in Nordenau Springs

A clip from Organima 4 — The Dodeda, Nik Arthur

The natural patterns formed in the salt marshes of Doñana National Park

A solar eclipse captured through the lens of a cellphone camera

Good design knows itself well.

A good landing page has a core that is irreplicable. It comes from building a great product, which in turn, comes from a clear vision. This vision stems from understanding the problem being solved and building a strong team that shares that understanding. You can’t hide a lack of substance behind the shell of what others have done before. If your landing page feels like a crab—just another surface-level imitation—it tells me you don’t understand your product or your people.

Remember that everything you experience can fuel your creative practice. Walk through gardens, visit museums, and attend symphonies—immerse yourself in a world outside the screen. The real answers you’re searching for won’t be found on another landing page. They’re scattered in the midst of a feeling you haven’t yet felt, a conversation you haven’t had, a moment that’s just on the verge of happening.

Just as we can draw a thread from a conversation about convergent crab evolution to the trends in landing pages, we can pull countless other threads from our lived experiences to shape our creative practices.

Let the richness of your life be your guide in ways no algorithm can predict. Real, timeless inspiration comes not from what’s already been done, but from what is waiting to be seen. From a place beyond the obvious. To survive and thrive for generations, design must go beyond mimicry—it must be personal, living, adaptable in its own way.

It’s time to step away from the screen: to screenshot a little less, and experience a little more.