

Overthinking Design - goldvine
http://www.smallhq.com/blog/your-startup-is-overthinking-design/

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Edd314159
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.

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wlesieutre
I think the takeaway is that it lets developers be the designers. Most
programmers I know are pretty good at solving problems, but they don't always
have an eye for visual details aspect of it. The style guide gives them a
framework to work in, and can hopefully prevent a UI atrocity.

Maybe hiring an outside designer to do the whole app would get you better
results, but if you're going to toss all of that as the app changes, it might
not be worth the expense. Assuming your devs aren't bad at user interaction
stuff, this gets you most of the way there at a small fraction of the cost.

~~~
goldvine
Very well said. Thank you for jumping in.

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

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oonny
I was thinking the same thing; the font color in the blog post can use some
contrast.

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keithpeter
Yes, HN has _ruined_ light grey on white for me as I tend to see it as a
downvote. Seriously, I'm not being funny about that - I have begun to perceive
low contrast light grey on white as something suspect.

~~~
goldvine
It's not that light...

You're saying that people downvote sites for having grey text on white instead
of black? That's idiotic...

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pessimizer
No, he's saying that grey text makes him think of a comment on hacker news
that has been downvoted.

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kyberias
Oh, this discussion is gold! ;)

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goldvine
Hahahah whoops - that does make much more sense :-)

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ThomPete
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.

~~~
goldvine
Thanks Thom

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

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supercoder
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...

~~~
goldvine
Added that distinction after the fact. The rest of the product "design" is
done by me, the founder/dev.

I don't really think someone needs to be hired for the sole-role of planning
wireframes, interaction, and flow.

That is a core skill of any maker.

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nej
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](https://medium.com/design-startups/c012e5ad32f7)

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duvander
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.

~~~
goldvine
Well said

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goldvine
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
:-)

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jtfairbank
Do you ask the designer to create the basic styles / example markup as well?
General things like buttons, alerts, perhaps some generic layouts. Or just
take the template they provide and have your in house devs hash that out?

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goldvine
I'm our only dev :-) I did all of that myself, and modify the guide moving
forward as things change.

We just need a good push in the right direction as our visual design skills
are seriously lacking.

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jtfairbank
Haha, sounds like me. Using bootstrap and playing around with the styles, I
can get the project 80% of the way there visually. I never feel satisfied with
my designs though... having a style guide to follow would probably be able to
bump me past that.

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

~~~
goldvine
We love it, and it's been a great launching pad. Which is what matters.

~~~
goldvine
We didn't choose that visual up front, we worked with a designer that chose
that look based on the product (Minimal Analytics). The brand has defined the
product over time and is very recognizable.

Whereas a flat css theme wouldn't have been unique or recognizable.

But I'm not going to change your mind ;-)

~~~
normloman
It's not unique or recognizable anyway. Minimal Analytics looks identical to
hundreds of other sites.

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caiob
But, how to teach old dogs a new trick?

~~~
goldvine
Can you clarify? :-)

