Should I answer this question about recreating this logo?

Question

This question here: Critique: what is my Gaypril logo lacking?

Effectively it's a question about recreating a logo design, even though the asker intends to make it just dissimilar enough that it's not exactly the same. It still goes beyond "finding inspiration", IMO. Still, I would like to answer it, but I'm unsure whether I should.

My first impulse was: Not without the original designer's permission. It's one thing if a design just happens to come out similar to another. But it's another thing to publicly help doing this kind of thing.

But I'm thinking: In my answer I would like to point out how the original works in terms of composition and rhythm: the shape created, distances, grey values, negative space and all that. None of which is all that easily recreated and balanced in the same manner. The answer would, I like to think, make tangible why design is much more than just being able to handle illustator and slap a few shapes and fonts together. So, it wouldn't so much give tips for copying the design as analyse the first logo in relation to its recreation attempt and give pointers as to how to improve one's "eye".

Sorry, if my question seems silly. I'm new here and I never tried to talk about design publicly on the internet.

Answer 1

The design in question is the result of a tutorial... permission to replicate what is created in a tutorial is kinda implied by it being a tutorial. Add to that that the asker is attempting to create a similar but different design by following the tutorial and I think that's totally OK.

Apart from that, we do get questions along the lines of "How can I replicate this design" and we don't, as far as I've seen, have a problem with that (from a copyright/permission/legal perspective anyway)... we don't know why the asker wants to replicate the design and I know that I learned a lot in my early days from trying to replicate what I thought was good design.

Unless the question explicitly says "I want to commercially use this copyrighted design and I don't want to pay for it so can you help me recreate it?" ...or something like that (in which case I think it would be an issue) then I think were OK.

There's of course nothing stopping you from questioning the asker on their motives in comments (just remember to be nice), but don't feel obliged to.