
Things I Learned Designing at Disqus - joshuasortino
http://joshuasortino.com/journal/14-things-learned-designing-at-disqus
======
aleem
If you are writing for a design audience, you are going to get a lot of frowns
for the 700KB paper background image you have on your blog (and the paper
barely even shows).

~~~
hnha
much worse (dark pattern?): on my mobile it puts a Twitter share link exactly
where my thumb is touching the screen for scrolling.

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ing33k
"Engineers should teach engineers GIT, designers should teach designers GIT."

is git part of modern design workflow ? how are designers using git ?

~~~
aidos
At any scale, git is probably not going to be your best bet. svn might
actually be a better option as it allows you to checkout just the parts of the
repository that you need.

More crucially, it doesn't keep the entire history locally (just working copy
and a the latest(ish) version in the repository). This really starts to matter
when you have 200mb PSDs.

There are probably even better options out there (though previous searches
didn't reveal anything I particularly got on with) - there are certainly
better options than git.

Ideally something based around the dropbox model (doing block level
deduplication) would be wonderful. Maybe such a product exists?

~~~
sfall
git does allow you to check out only a selection of version history

~~~
aidos
Oh ok, but that's not how it would operate, right? So, say it was just me
working on a project using a psd. If I committed it a couple of times a day,
I'd end up with all the old copies in the local object store. Maybe it's
possible to clear those out, somehow? Either way, you'll find that you have to
jump through hoops to get reasonable behaviour with git in this use case.

I see I've been downvoted for my previous comment. I'd appreciate a
justification from the downvoter as this is actually an area in which I have
some experience.

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DigitalSea
I agree with pretty much everything, except designers using Git. Sadly, Git
doesn't work for PSD files properly. Some of the PSD files I've worked with
before (900mb+) for larger websites and applications would definitely not be a
good fit for Git. Although I think the blame lies mostly on Photoshop's end
not being the right tool for web design, but being used by designers anyway. I
think whatever tool ends up replacing Photoshop as the de-facto standard (if
it happens) should ideally have a visual re-visioning system built in a la
Adobe Creative Cloud.

We aren't quite at that point where designers are saving out all of the assets
for you, then that would be different. You can source control individual
assets, but not a large PSD file properly. I've begun to train the designers
at my work to save out assets for pretty much everything leaving me to solve
the engineering problems like how everything is going to work and less time
cutting out images from a PSD file, but we aren't quite there yet where this
is a universal thing that designers just know and willing do.

Some people might disagree with point #6, but I wholeheartedly agree as
someone who works for a company where designers design and developers develop.
I think to be truly great at design, you need to devote at least 90% of your
time (minimum) to bettering your design skills. If you're a developer, the
opposite rings true. I think it is important for design/dev to have a mutual
understanding of one another, but I don't think you can truly be a great
designer and great developer in one. Having an understanding of the other
perspective is important. You'll never meet a surgeon who specialises in brain
and heart surgery, why should design and development be any different?

Fortunately, the employer I work for doesn't compartmentalise the teams from
one another. There is nothing more horrible than working in a place where
design and development teams are on separate sides of the office or even
different floors with the only communicative layer being a project manager or
team leaders. Designers and developers sit down and tackle problems together
and educate one another in the process. This is something that happens through
the whole process from wire-framing to prototyping to final build. I think
designers and developers should work together at every step. I have met
talented design/developers, but great ones of both fields are extremely rare.

PS. Joshua, if you're reading this comment, you might want to reconsider the
670kb background image on your site. I loaded your blog on my slow ADSL
connection and it was painful.

~~~
scrollaway
I'm not a designer, so please enlighten me. What kind of data can be held in a
single image for a PSD to be 900 megabytes? Is it a single PSD for hundreds of
web pages or?

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ch4s3
Tons and tons of layers, I mean literally hundreds.

~~~
whichdan
To elaborate, for anyone who hasn't used Photoshop (in several years): you can
have layer groups which act as folders containing several related layers, so
when you're browsing layers, it isn't just a mess of 500 some-odd rows.

~~~
ch4s3
Yeah, I should have mentioned that. You can also stuff a lot of component
images into a psd that wouldn't necessarily make it into a final web design.

~~~
kbenson
Sounds like what's needed is a way to extract a PSD into a component file
structure, and combine that structure back into a PSD. Without knowing
anything about PSDs, I assume it would contain lists of layers with links to
resources such as images or whatever is required to approximate the desired
view. Something like that as a plugin or hooked to run before and after
commits would be really useful in this case.

Depending on how hard the PSD format is to grok (purposefully or otherwise),
this may be nigh impossible, but it also seems like it would be a great
exchange format (which may be a another reason Adobe wouldn't want it). Then
again, maybe there's already something like this...?

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greggman
> Designers are generally right brained and engineers are usually left brained

Is that true? Even if it's a myth of left vs right side of the brain are
designers and engineers really that different in the brain?

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pessimizer
It's pseudoscience. His point isn't, though: some people are more
deductive/math oriented, some people are more associative/aesthetically
oriented, and some people are neither. It's good for them to mix.

~~~
joshuasortino
Yup.

I know the whole left/right brain thing isn't real science. I was using it as
a common metaphor. Designers and engineers typically approach things
differently. Learn from someone else's approach.

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porker
Would you say #6 and #7 are true generally, or Joshua's opinion?

To avoid inefficiency I find having people 'jigsaw-puzzle-piece' shaped helps
- it means they're not always waiting on Bob on the desk over there to do the
task that's blocking them (even if that task is only "Export an item from a
PSD").

~~~
scrollaway
#6 is just semantics. Multi-purpose people are great. Rare and exceptional
people are great. Designers who can code are great. What does it matter what
you call them?

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hannesfostie
Isn't there something to be said about engineers teaching designers git, and
the other way around? I understand that what you're saying is easier and more
efficient, but learning to communicate should be a pretty big deal, and
teaching others helps a lot.

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j_s
Does anyone have any thoughts on Disqus, particularly reviewing the usability
and/or design aspects?

I see the service itself as meeting a need for those with static sites or who
otherwise don't want to deal with managing their own commenting system. Disqus
has also made some business decisions to increase revenue that have upset a
few HN'ers¹. I haven't heard any complaints about usability or other design
issues, though.

¹
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220072)

~~~
joshuasortino
Even if you haven't heard them, we still get complaints about the usability of
the product! It's what we did with the feedback that matters.

As for the business decisions, those were decided by VPs and the business
development team.

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rys
The thing that stood out for me is that over a billion unique people use the
service. Does it really underpin that much of the modern Internet?

~~~
Pacabel
How many of those are voluntary, active users, though?

I see them more as "victims" of it, who are subjected to it without giving
much consent at all. Somebody loads a blog article or some other web page that
uses Disqus for accepting and showing comments, and without necessarily
wanting to use it the page's visitors have become "users" of Disqus.

~~~
netcan
sheesh. That's a bit much.

The site owner chooses a commenting system. People who want to comment,
comment using it. Victims?!

~~~
aidos
Victims is a pretty loaded term, but it's not an unreasonable accusation. The
number of unique monthly users of disqus shouldn't be based on those who
unwittingly use it.

Reading your comment again, I wonder what the true definition is. Is the
number based on page views? Or is it the number of people who actively
interact with the widget (say, posting a comment) after it has loaded? Sounds
like you're assuming the later metric while the 'victims' comment is assuming
the former.

Edit: thinking about it, 1 billion unique people, that sounds like the victim
class to me.

