Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders | Hacker News Reader

Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

black.design

239 pointsArmandGrillet29 comments

For those others who tend to go to the comments before clicking through, these aren't tools for _visual_ design, they're for _product_ design - how to pitch your product, how to plan your MVP etc.

Glad to see these hit the front page, they were a big inspiration behind the product design parts of https://nichetester.com, particularly the idea of visualising a tagline by throwing it up on a T Shirt.

I just did the MVP design quiz. Here's the result

http://www.black.design/wp-content/themes/make-child/mvp-out...

This output document doesn't make any sense to me. Ticks and crosses everywhere, some lines are blue, some not.

I feel bad that I have to ask for help on how to interpret this document from a website that is all about design.

It just doesn't display your own answers (relative to the static correct answers), giving the impression that there's no correlation between what you attempted, versus the actual expected answers.

Also, I agree that "X" usually is an indicator of a "wrong" answer. And why place check marks (⍻) across all of the other answers, when check marks ordinarily indicate correct/approved answers?

It seems like a bug. It would make sense if there were NOTHING for incorrect answers left unmarked, an X for YOUR unmarked correct answers or marked incorrect answers, and check marks for the answers you marked off correctly.

Given that it's a quiz, people want to compare their answers to the expected answers, so I think they need to create this logic, or patch whatever bug is preventing the answer markings from rendering properly.

Blue lines are the 'correct' answers, they are the MVP features of each product.

Next to each line you get a tick or a cross depending on whether your answer matches theirs. For instance if you got a tick next to a line that was not blue, then it means you agreed with them that it was not an MVP feature.

to be a little bit cynical..... is this a way for them to harvest ideas?

It's content marketing. They run two design businesses on the side.

http://blackappl.com/main http://www.hatebranding.com/

IMHO not cynical, but a valid question. I was thinking the same. The site has no privacy policy or even good explanation how your data is used other than generating the outputs. "Startups please enter your ideas, and we do our magic with it.".. I would be quite hesitant to do so.

A bit pedantic, but this is more product management. Not design.

I think the strongest Product Designers wind up taking on responsibilities that PM's might traditionally hold (and vice versa).

I'm fairly biased here, but I'd argue that product vision is often best executed in the hands of product designers rather than PMs. Having a design leader who takes the product or feature from high level goals, to flows & interactions, and finally down to the pixels often leads to a less-compromised end result. I usually find that singular vision beats design-by-committee.

Of course, this rarely happens due to company politics, which PMs tend to excel at versus designers.

As much as I want this to be true, there is (in my experience) an observable difference between product designers and product managers when it comes to understanding technical and business problems... especially in communicating with engineers.

As egotistical and tyrannical as PMs can sometimes be, I have learned to appreciate their function... however, they love to believe that they are miniature CEOs which is hilarious and incredibly annoying at the same time. Designers in lead roles don’t seem to have this problem. Maybe it comes with the MBA.

I agree with this but with a strong caveat. I believe product designers excel in B2C applications but aren't often as successful in B2B and Enterprise focused applications.

Nice tool set. I've definitely seen more than a few startups that would benefit greatly by filling out the details asked here.

Man these are good ! I was very impressed with the professional look and downright usability!

Do (did?) you work for bloomberg? Very similar to their old online style - I like it!

This should be pinned somewhere. So much time could be saved.

In the messaging design, I love that you put it on a t-shirt and on the side of a van.

Thanks to you, whether we understand it or not, we are all in the t-shirt business now.

Huh. Design is so subjective. I would not call this site "aesthetic".

This is about the design process, not a particular visual aesthetic.

agreed !

Copyright notices aren't there to tell you what the current year is. What would the point of that be? Everybody knows what the current year is.

Copyright notices are there to declare when a creative work was created. That's when the copyright term starts. If you just set it to the current year you're lying about when the copyright expires and it renders the notice invalid (at least in the USA).

In this case, you can see from the Wayback Machine that this was, in fact, created in 2016 [0]. So that copyright notice is correct, and you're implying it should be changed to be incorrect.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161128194614/http://www.black....

There's already tonnes of bad advice out there telling people that copyright notices should always display the current year. Please don't spread this idea.

Thanks Jim for highlighting this and teaching about a common misconception. My intent was to help the author avoid the “dead website” feel of a 2-3 year old (c) label. Updating the year to current year could be one solution but I was not proposing anything.

I hear your point on the legality angle and have done a ton of reading to update my own stance on this.

What happens when the created work is edited? Is there some threshold of trivial edits below which you can't change the year in the notice?

I mean presumably if you do edit it, people still have the right to use older versions when the copyright expires. But how does that play with the requirement to give notice?

Your statement makes a ton of sense. Assuming you’re correct, it is a bit crazy how many sites have the copyright programmatically set to the current year.

I thought it meant that the copyright was still valid as of current year

Wonderful design - I’d consider this to be brutalist design already!

Too bad I cannot value the usefulness of the product, but it looks great.

Suprisingly to me to lot of people it looks bad. Same goes for Bloomberg which is similar. The reason why it is suprising to me is because this is how lot of the things looked in 60s and 70s. The medium/bold helvetica with clear colors coming from swiss design school. Lots of stuff used to be like this.

The problem with the design of this page isn't with the font, or with the decision to minimize decoration. The execution in that regard is done well.

The big problem is an aggressive blue (RGB 0,0,255) and similarly extreme Yellow (255,255,0). My eyes actually hurt when I scrolled to the bottom of the page and observed the yellow - there's a reason that these shades are reserved for CSS testing purposes only. This service is letting me know that they think their own time is too precious to spare a potential user a headache. It's not edgy or cool - it's entitled and lazy.

Lack of padding (aka breathing room) around text elements is a second but admittedly much more minor problem.

I would like a service that touts Design in the name to be at least semi-conscious of some very basic user-friendly design principles.

I mean about colors i actually like pure RGB colors. It is very lively vibrant, but i guess that is taste.

About the spacing admitedly i saw this on mobile and it looked great but now after seeing on desktop it is not that great. I am not fan of long lines of text.

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