

Ask HN: Who are the best designers in Silicon Valley? - pkpp1233

Who are considered the best designers in Silicon Valley? Pretty simple question, just looking for a list.<p>Hope to model my work off theirs. And potentially bother them for feedback one day since they&#x27;re close to home.
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vitovito
Jesse James Garrett gave the closing plenary at IA Summit 2009, and he asked a
question of the audience, name some great designers.

And the audience shouted out names.

Then he asked, name the works of design they are considered great for.

And the audience was silent.

...

Don't look for names. Look for works, and then find out who made them.

If you don't know what's considered good work, don't ask like you asked this
question. "Good" is subjective, and design is not art; design has a purpose,
is backed by research, has metrics, supports a business model. Rather, you
want to study work that _solves the problem the designer intended._ Maybe they
intended to make it easy to book an airline ticket, or maybe they intended to
appease ten different executive vice presidents. Pick any work, and learn why
it was made that way, and determine if it's great or not (or, more likely, if
there are _aspects_ which are great _for a particular use case_ ). You could
do in-depth interviews, you could do contextual inquiry, you could ask the
designer, you could usability test it, you could go through heuristics, you
could do GOMS, there are any number of methods.

But don't look for names first.

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divisive
>" Good" is subjective

I'm not sure how true that is. There are principles of design, across fields,
within fields, and in specific use cases, and you can judge based on the
principles how good a design is. "Good" may be hard to define in general and
in each context, but it's not as subjective as people think it is.

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CmonDev
Try finding the designers behind Microsoft's Metro. Based on the amount of
copying by iOS and Android since then, they must be one of the best.

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dangrossman
The Metro design philosophy is the defunct Zune team's true legacy. Their work
on the PMP went to waste mostly due to timing, but their design work has lived
on in everything else Microsoft has done since. Virtually all the core tenants
of Windows Phone and Windows 8's design, from typography as hierarchy to live
tiles and colorful flat design, were first seen in the Zune desktop software
and Zune HD's UI.

~~~
CmonDev
Very true, at least the rest of people were smart enough to keep evolving
their concepts instead of going to mainstream same ol'.

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kcovia
Probably not what you're looking for, as he does industrial design, not web
design, but Jony Ive is definitely up there.

