
The websites of all the YC companies look similar. Have they all been worked on by the same designer? - subhash

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pg
No, but they've all been nagged to fix the same things, which tends to produce
a certain similarity.

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subhash
That is encouraging. If folks with no previous design experience (assuming)
can dish out beautiful html and css, that is indeed encouraging to the rest of
us :) Any pointers to templates or design guides?

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pg
Our general rule is, if you don't have any graphic design sense (and only
about 10% of founders do), just make the site as sparse as possible. Worked
for Google.

In at least one case (reddit), the founders had a great sense of design and
yet chose to make the site sparse anyway. This was because as a news site they
wanted to emphasize the information on the page and make the site itself fade
into the background.

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brlewis
I want to amplify the point about emphasizing user-supplied information. About
a year ago when my alumni class started using ourdoings.com for class notes, I
knew graphic design was lacking. I was surprised by comments like "the new
format looks great." Then I figured out that by making the information/photos
people wanted more accessible, they were more pleased by what they saw.

The design of ourdoings.com is relatively subtle, as most picture frames are,
but back then it was even uglier than it is now. Nevertheless, people look at
what they're interested in.

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danielha
I think it's just a matter of following a few core design principles in the
early stages. Many of the founders aren't designers and the sites were
somewhat built learning from each other.

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gyro_robo
It's the "Web 2.0" fashion, kind of like punk kids all making the same kind of
skinny jeans.

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weel
There's probably some truth to this, but on the other hand, there are some
good UI reasons for following conventions. Graphical conventions can make your
application easier to use, because people already know them. The world of UI
design is fulll of such conventions: red: stop, green: go, squares: check
multiple, circles: check one. US light switches are easier to use than the
European kind because they are more consistently mounted in the same
direction. Designing UIs is all about finding metaphors that already make
sense to people, either because they are used in the real world, or because
they are used in some very popular systems people are already familiar with.
(E.g., most desktop applications put "find" in the "edit" menu. Does it make
sense? Not really. But by now, that's where people look, so that's where you
should stick it.)

That said, there are some conventions in recently fashionable web applications
that seem to be nothing but fashion. That's less of a UI design thing, and
more of a marketing thing. Presumably, there is some sweet spot between total
conformism and utter disregard for the contemporary norm that strikes the
balance between attention-grabbing and comfort-instilling. Personally, I would
say: when in doubt, keep it simple. (That's my personal taste speaking, not
any kind of business experience.)

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SwellJoe
I'd be curious if you think that of our new site at
<http://www.virtualmin.com>

We were in WFP07, and just launched the new site this past weekend...it was
designed during the time when we were talking to YC companies every week...I
wonder if those discussions bred conformity.

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crystalarchives
It does look very similar to the YC sites, but that's not a bad thing at all -
it looks very good, intuitive and beautiful.

