I've seen this before

You here many criticisms levelled at new projects, but one common one is “I’ve seen this before”.

It’s a difficult one to deal with for a designer, because the aim is to keep on creating totally new stuff, right?

In reality barely anything is totally new, so the criticism could be almost universally applied. Take the iPod for instance - it wasn’t the first hard drive based MP3 player by any means, but it was still a successful design.

I don’t think designers should be worried about constantly creating completely new stuff. Making stuff better, and more delightful is just as important.