
Designer News - petercooper
https://news.layervault.com/
======
karjaluoto
I like the idea of an "HN for designers." That said, I don't think it will
work.

We built something similar around 2008 and maintained it for a couple of
years. Ultimately, we chose to shut it down, due to the difficulty in getting
good discussion, and the amount of "pseudo-spam" from folks who would flood us
with links to crap and designer link-bait.

My suggestion is to ignore the design feedback you're getting here. It's not
that it isn't perhaps accurate; it's just not your biggest concern.

In my opinion, the real key with these communities is the discussion. HN is
ugly, but the content is good. Additionally, the active nature of the
community is huge. Part of that has to do with it having first-move advantage;
the other may be the associated "carrot" of pg looking at contributor
involvement, come application time.

My hunch is that the biggest part of why HN is so active relates to startup-
folk being more concerned with the data/insight than presentation. I could be
entirely incorrect on this point, but my feeling is that the majority of
designers simply aren't geared the same way. They're more interested in seeing
eye-candy than reading, thinking, and discussing.

This is a generalization, and there are certainly designers who are geared
quite differently. (Personally, I find sites like dribbble really boring, but
am on HN within 5 minutes of waking.)

The challenge here, for you will be in getting a sufficient mass of _good_
contributors/commenters (i.e. Thoughtful, meaningful dialogue). I think it's
will be hard to make this happen. I do hope you'll prove me wrong, though, as
the design community could use something like this.

~~~
ScottWhigham
_HN is ugly_

What? No way - this is absolutely a case of function instead of pomp and
circumstance. One of the huge reasons, I believe, that HN was really kicked
off well was because when Digg went stupid and redesigned their site (which
looks like OP's design to a degree) people wanted more hacker/programmer style
stories in a denser, less ad-drive way. HN was perfectly placed and lots of
folks came over (lots of the better users, that is). These people hated the
design of digg (a.k.a. "scroll scroll scroll") and needed a more information
dense yet content and comment rich environment. This place thrived as did
reddit - both sites who offer very dense information pages (reddit has
styles/options to make it less dense though).

So yes, design is a huge factor IMO. Startup folks, articles, good comments -
all of that works together with the design. You can't say that HN works
despite being "ugly".

~~~
karjaluoto
Actually, I can say that (and I did).

And when I say it's ugly, I'm not really talking about style. Instead, I'm
referring to how I have to pinch and zoom when reading posts on my smartphone,
and the awfully long line lengths, and the small type.

I get that such points probably aren't important to pg (or the community at
large) and I can appreciate that. If it works, why muck with it? Still, I
don't think it's a stretch to say that the design of this site probably wasn't
ever treated as a key concern.

------
clicks
The gratuitously large amount of whitespace in comments pages is a little off-
putting. The very, very light gray meta-info text on white bg is hard to read
in the comments container; as is the kind-of-blue text on light blue bg. The
icons are _not_ descriptive enough as stand-alones to exist without text
indication of what they do, or something similar.

So basically, this is just walking into the 'flat' fad without any careful
thought. I'm just in disbelief. I'm primarily a back-end coder but I've
designed better sites than this.

Edit: I realize I'm being a little bit mean, and I don't like being mean...
but I think it's perhaps warranted this time given the name of the site.

~~~
radley
<http://contrastrebellion.com/>

~~~
jgh
I like how HN is actually one of the low-contrast examples and the comment
you're replying to is complaining about contrast.

~~~
radley
Here's a good example of what they mean:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711>

This is hard to read. I'd guess PG may have decided to keep it this way so
users don't post too many (long) messages.

------
ktrgardiner
For something aimed at designers, it's disappointing that the design is
lacking. The font color is too light. I have young eyes and I found myself
straining a little to read. This is especially poor since the number of points
is in this light color. Points are what people look for and yet they don't pop
out at you.

Another issue is the menu at the top; I didn't know the clock meant new until
I clicked it. Adding a hover (at the very least) would make it more friendly
to new users.

The key is to not go overboard with minimalism. At the end of the day, certain
details that people look for in order to familiarize themselves with something
cannot be eliminated for the sake of aesthetic.

~~~
felixbraun
The design is optimized for Retina Displays – the typo is perfectly readable
and the contrast is great; on 2x devices.

Less so on 1x though, agreed.

[https://s3-eu-
west-1.amazonaws.com/d013/Screen+Shot+2013-01-...](https://s3-eu-
west-1.amazonaws.com/d013/Screen+Shot+2013-01-21+at+17.03.56.png)

~~~
ktrgardiner
Then you are optimizing for a minority of your audience and alienating the
majority, all for a shade of gray. Readability should never be compromised.

edit: And before this is perceived as me being hostile rather than my
intention of helpful (though it seems it already has), let me say that this is
the kind of site I have been looking for. And thus I want to use it and want
it to succeed. But certain design decisions can imply things to users that may
not be intended. Content that is difficult to read, especially content which
calls for interaction, does the opposite of what its intended for. And that
makes users feel as if they're not wanted.

~~~
ameen
I think here's where the difference would apply. Designers almost all of them
use high resolution displays. And maybe Designer News is aimed at those
designers, who're at the cutting edge.

~~~
mnicole
That in itself seems like bad design, doesn't it? :)

~~~
ameen
Well, its just designing for a target audience. It isn't universal design if
that's what you mean.

------
jenskanis
Great initiative but I do have some feedback. The first thing I notice is that
the top menu is unusable. I have no idea what the links do, I only can guess
when seeing the icons. The smiley icon is the most confusing.

The second thing are the icons besides the posts. I guess the goal is to help
users categorize posts, with the current number of categories it helps. But
when all posts match a category you will could have, in theory, 20 categories.
This won't help categorize, this will only help confuse people.

The third thing is the text. The lack of dots between the timestamp, username
and count of points completely confuses me. When I read the entire line, I
will think that Benjamin F. added 3 points 28 minutes ago to the link above.
When in fact there are a total of 3 points added to the link above, the post
submitter is Benjamin F. and the link was submitted 28 minutes ago. Placing
two simple dots helps users not get confused.

I notice a lot of designers want to design something visually attractive but
completely don't think about UX/UI. This is a perfect example.

~~~
Gormo
Also, the tooltips on the timestamps make no sense. I'm not a fan of the "x
hours ago" style of relative timestamp, and much prefer to just know the
actual date and time an item was posted. Some sites, such as reddit, give you
an absolute timestamp in a tooltip when you hover over a relative one, e.g.
hovering over "2 hours ago" on a reddit comment produces a tooltip that says
"Mon Jan 21 12:15:37 2013 UTC".

But hovering over "about 2 hours ago" on a Designer News post produces a
tooltip that says "20 minutes ago". What's going on here?

------
anujkk
Reading some comments on Designer News [1], I can already see some HN-DN
clash.

[1] [https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on-
hac...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on-hacker-news)

 _It's amazing how many UI/UX experts you can find on Hacker News._

Not everyone who makes a comment is an expert but even then they can have an
opinion and they have all the right to express it. Whether you are a hacker or
designer you should be professional enough to be grateful that people are even
making an effort to express their true opinion. BTW, there are many real UI/UX
experts here and I guess there must be some great hackers on Designer News.
Can't both peacefully co-exist without making nasty remarks on each other?

 _Ha ha some of the comments are funny. - "I have no idea what the links do, I
only can guess when seeing the icons. The smiley icon is the most confusing."

so CLICK THEM if you're not sure. Sheesh where's people sense of adventure and
discovery these days. And c'mon you don't know what a plus sign might mean?_

It is amazing how one can find it funny when someone points a major flaw in
design that results in terrible user experience. Beautiful icons are of no use
if they don't convey clear message to the user. Such designs are similar to a
beautiful girl who is mad. When will we learn to accept our mistakes?

The discussion in that thread left me with a sour taste. Forget about the
design of site, now I have serious doubts about the quality of the actual
community there.

~~~
mrxd
At the risk of overgeneralizing, many in the HN community are clearly
defensive about their lack of design skills. Almost every time a nice-looking
link comes up, the reaction is predictable: you'll find lots of comments
finding fault with the design.

In a lot of cases, those comments are accurate. Design is hard, and designers
don't get it right 100% of the time. What's strange about these comments is
that they only come up when the author of the link is a designer -- no one
makes comments about design problems on developers' blogs.

So it seems like there's an attitude of wanting to take down designers a few
notches, which is a bit unprofessional and immature, IMO.

------
elou
It's worth it to note that Designer News began as a side project, which may
explain the less-than-perfect design details. I guess you could argue that a
side project intended for designers should still meet basic accessibility
guidelines, but the point certainly apologizes for some of the weaknesses of
the framework.

I am very excited about the future of Designer News. As the community grows
and matures, I hope it will conjure more discussion-oriented posts and less of
the generic links that have made up the bulk of the content. But there is
really no place for designers to discuss thought-provoking articles and trends
or ask for feedback/criticism. I find Hacker News to be somewhat intimidating
as a venue for design discussion, or unable to provide the perspective I am
seeking feedback on. Other sides such as Dribbble or Forrest tend to be poor
venues for constructive conversation - perhaps because it is the same place
where people are displaying their work that might go under fire during the
conversation, and many of us don't like to shit where we eat, as it were.

It's a strong concept, even if it needs a few more weekends of polish before
it's truly fit for prime time.

~~~
athesyn
After reading Designer News for the past week I've noticed most threads have
zero (or single-sentence) comments nevermind in-depth discussions.

No offense, but it's essentially a dead-forum and to make it invite-only shows
the bigger picture is out of their grasp. I hope they open registrations and
shape itself to be something...anything.

~~~
kellysutton
Designer News is invite-only and will remain so forever.

While it's still in its early stages, we want to future proof things quite a
bit. Currently, we can map our users onto a directed graph which will help
immensely with spam, dead accounts and so forth. (If you're a spammer,
everyone you've invited gets their account nuked along with the person that
invited you.)

Also, one of our users put together a sweet visualization of this in action,
which you can see here:

<http://ejfox.github.com/DesignerNewsMembers/>

~~~
pclark
Pretty sure things like this:
<https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/293495292265893888> entirely taint any
intellectual reasoning behind invites.

~~~
kellysutton
Paul's a friend and I trust his ability to dole out invites. That's why we
gave him some.

------
tlrobinson
Looks more like Reddit than Hacker News:

    
    
        Kevin T. about 7 hours ago
        We have to go deeper.
    
            Marian M. about 6 hours ago
            That's what she said.
    
        Tyler H. about 7 hours ago
            YO DAWG - http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/33729543.jpg
    

[https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on-
hac...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on-hacker-news)

...

 _"We're keeping things small and invite-only to ensure quality."_

<https://news.layervault.com/signup>

Heh. Was Hacker News ever invite-only?

~~~
pclark
I think the reason why Hacker News works is because the demographic are not
_all the same_ \- there are all kinds of people that are active on the site,
rather than simply "friends of x" and "friends of friends of x" which often
leads to inane comments like the examples you listed.

I don't think one can engineer this collision of demographics, I doubt the
design nor even content allows you to control it once the wheels are in
motion.

------
ScottWhigham
Put me in the "Wow - that's too much white space" category. I'm on a 1680x1050
monitor and I have to scroll once to get to the bottom of 20 articles. And
let's face it: they are presented as _sentences_. That means that, for me to
read 20 sentences, I have to scroll. Again: I have to scroll just so that I
can read 20 sentences yet I'm on a 1680x1050 desktop device.

I just don't understand this sort of design. It's the kind of thing that looks
good on paper but, once you try to use it, it becomes obvious that you aren't
presenting people with enough information per click. So I kind of understand
someone giving me a comp for a design like this, but I don't understand
someone putting this out "live" and then not recognizing the inherent and
obvious problems that this amount of white space cause.

Also, put in the "I despise hate icon-only navigation, especially when I'm on
a new site" group. The icons also don't make any sense to me. WTH is a smiley
face for? No alt title or helpful hint when I mouse over - I have to view the
URL to see what it is. Unusable. Unfriendly. And the plus sign is also a
login? Whoa...

Sorry - I could not ever use a site like that.

------
pubby
> We're keeping things small and invite-only to ensure quality.

If you're going to be a gated community then don't post it on HN.

(also, I seriously doubt this ensures "quality".)

~~~
kellysutton
We didn't post it.

------
thecosas
A lot of the points outlined by commenters here have already been brought up
by the Designer News community in this Feature Request thread:
[https://news.layervault.com/stories/126-feature-requests-
let...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/126-feature-requests-lets-talk-
about-designer-news). If you're already a member, that's where you can add
feedback.

------
speeder
I am using a Samsung monitor that kinds fails at contrast.

Also I have a design degree.

Summing the two I can conclude: Your color scheme is veeeery bad, and strange
considering the site is called designer news.

------
eranation
Nice concept, I liked the circle "categories" (CSS, Show, etc)

But one things that really bothers me, especially in a design oriented site,
when using image only cues, at least add a title / alt for a tooltip: (1) for
accessibility and screen readers (2) for users who don't get the hint of the
clock/newspaper/plus icons as the equivalent newest/news/submit concepts from
HN.

Good potential, nice MVP overall

------
waxjar
I find this site to be designed rather poorly, especially for a project you'd
expect good design of.

\- I find the icons in the bar on the top to be rather *ambiguous. I don't
immediately know what purpose they serve, save for the + icon. Some text (just
text?) would be useful here.

\- The text underneath the link titles is very hard to read. I have to squint.
The colour is too close to the white background it's on.

\- I have no idea what the tomato and the T circle are supposed to indicate.

\- Nested comments aren't easily scrolled over, because the indentation is
quite small.

I'm not a designer at all, these are just some things that I notice as a user.
Aesthetically I find the site to be quite pretty.

Edit: I like the concept a lot!

~~~
andrewmunsell
1\. "Unambiguous" is good-- you probably mean they _are_ ambiguous.

3\. It's an Apple, not a tomato. I'm guessing articles having to do with Apple
have that "badge". The "T" is indicating a typography related story, whereas
the "Show" badge is a "Show DN" post.

I was not involved in the site, the badge thing is just observation.

~~~
blackjack160
Given that one badge is Show, my natural inclination was to think that T is
tell. YMMV.

------
alexchantastic
It would be nice to link to the actual article rather than the Designer News
link in RSS.

------
artursapek
For a website called Designer News that header bar is pretty fucking
incoherent.

------
pekk
I have absolutely no idea what the icons at the top of the page mean. Why is
that good?

------
raven_king
Looks neat! What is this written on? Are you making the source available?

~~~
gbrindisi
Search for lamernews for the same thing but opensource and redis based
(written by antirez)

~~~
raven_king
Thanks for your reply. But Lamernews does not seem to have search. I also
found lobste.rs to be good. It is also based on rails and seems like a good
choice if someone wants to set up a hackernews style board. Guess I'll try
coding up something similar in Django for this month..or does something
already exist?

------
level09
I like the idea. not very impressed by the design though ..

------
usaphp
I like the design of your site very much (I am a web designer), most of the
people who complain about design here - are just programmer - don't ever let a
programmer to tell you how a proper design should look like...

~~~
anujkk
I find some serious issues with the design, not in terms of aesthetics, but in
terms of usability. I am a programmer, a web designer, a marketeer and a
business guy.

 _don't ever let a programmer to tell you how a proper design should look
like..._

Don't ever let anyone tell you to ignore genuine feedback from anyone
especially when he can be a potential user of your site. Focus on what the
feedback is and if it is good for your project and not on the "profession" of
the person who gave you feedback. Also, I have all the reasons to believe the
person who you are giving this advice, who created this site, is also a
programmer.

~~~
usaphp
Looking at your personal website: <http://www.anujkumar.com> \- it's very hard
to tell that you have any relation to web design.

