from Hacker News

Overthinking Design

by goldvine on 2/19/14, 5:43 PM with 35 comments

• by Edd314159 on 2/19/14, 6:38 PM

  While I believe that it works for you, your "early product design" process doesn't sound anything like interface design. It's just a subset of branding. Design is solving problems, not just choosing what the buttons on your website will look like before you have your product or any kind of context (the order of which sounds backwards to me.)

  > And it’s not all about looks, you know.

  You say this, and maybe I'm missing the point of your post, but you continue to describe how this process is entirely about how things look.

  Additionally, I have an issue with this:

  > Over time, you’ll build up a collection of “liked” work that you can show to any designer to give them a concrete idea of the style you like.

  This sounds like a horrible idea. Any decent designer out there knows that Dribbble exists and doesn't need you to point that out to them. They likely have their own "style" (if we're reducing "design" to just aesthetics for the purpose of discussion) and won't like you showing them what "style" you want them to adopt. Their job as a designer is to solve problems, not make things look pretty in Photoshop according to your taste parameters. Everything they produce should adhere to your brand guidelines, but that's it.

• by kyberias on 2/19/14, 6:01 PM

  And you're underthinking your selection of the font color with regards to the background color of the page.

• by ThomPete on 2/19/14, 6:19 PM

  Some startups are so early in their field and creating a new industry that design isn't important.

  Others are later to the game and can use design to differentiate from those early in the game who didn't get around to it.

  And finally some need to think long and hard about their design because it's become a hygiene factor.

  That pretty much sums up my take on things.

• by philipjoubert on 2/19/14, 7:03 PM

  The designers at Salesforce recently wrote an excellent blogpost that relates to this: https://medium.com/p/c8f3001f709b

  tl;dr Salesforce made a style guide and a HTML/CSS UI kit of the style guide. This allowed them to implement designs faster.

• by supercoder on 2/19/14, 10:05 PM

  Underthinking Design ?

  All they've got here is a style guide. Totally ignoring all the rest of the design process when it comes to the interaction, layout etc.

  Maybe if they made the distinction to only say 'Overthinking visual design' but really I'm still not sure what to take away from this article...

• by nej on 2/19/14, 9:31 PM

  I think it's also worth reading "Why you should move that button 3px to the left"[0] article from Medium.

  [0] https://medium.com/design-startups/c012e5ad32f7

• by duvander on 2/19/14, 7:08 PM

  A style guide is an important way to keep everybody on the same page. Not enough products have one. As others (including the OP) suggest, this is not the entirety of design, but it's a great step after something like Bootstrap to help differentiate the product.

• by goldvine on 2/19/14, 5:45 PM

  Curious to get the hacker perspective on this topic...have you tried this method with your products? Tried something else that worked well? Let's chat :-)

• by normloman on 2/19/14, 7:14 PM

  And when you pay good money for a style guide that amounts to the iOS 7 theme, you're underthinking design.

• by caiob on 2/19/14, 6:33 PM

  But, how to teach old dogs a new trick?