How Design Works
startupsthisishowdesignworks.com
startupsthisishowdesignworks.com
It is also avoiding pie charts in general (see Tufte for an explanation), and definitely those with just two data points.
Content-wise, the key message seems to be that AirBNB, Apple and a few others place a high value on visual design and are successful, therefore you should emulate that in order to be successful yourself.
I've got to say, it's all a bit superficial for my taste. Others might find it a good starting point, especially for some of the referenced resources.
Someone came up with pie-charts a while back, others thought it looked cool, and it unfortunately stuck around.
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-c...
Unfortunately, pie charts stuck around and they're usually lousy.
(http://www.economist.com/node/10278643?story_id=10278643)
EDIT: And this article explains the problems:
When you realize how little message is actually contained there then they seem to be less about telling you something useful and more about looking pretty.
Also, I feel like trying to recruit designers off Dribbble is like trying to recruit novelists off Twitter. It's hard to gauge somebody's higher level product design skills by looking at 400x300 shots devoid of context. The benefits usually associated with having designers on board come from their empathy and desire to solve problems. "I just want to make pretty things" designers on Dribbble won't provide you this if they are the only designer you have.
Last month I was communicating with designers on Dribbble looking for full-time startup work, and I was sadly unsurprised to find out that none of them were interested in solving problems. (Note: I'm a designer myself)
The reason you can't find anyone you want comes down to the very essence of the site: a place for artists to show off their pixel perfect creations on 400px canvases. Artists aren't that great at problem solving, but they can make really beautiful UI and related imagery. Go there when you need pixel magic, but I wouldn't expect to find the kinds of people to solve high level design problems.
You are probably looking for a "design thinker" type. Someone with a brain sculpted by a big consultancy like IDEO, Frog, etc. trained to think about design in terms of logic and creative thinking rather than visuals. But definitely not an artist.
Good luck.
Yes I agree Dribbble is a problematic site. I cannot believe graphic design has been reduced to fractions of the work with no brief.
Honestly, all the word "design" means to me is "I take so long to get anything done that I must plan my ass off like I only have one shot, and force everyone else to work this way".
Just get stuff done, and move on. No ones going to give a crap about your sweet design if your product doesn't do anything.
At the same time, function without design is an ugly cement cube with no windows for a house; sure, it does the trick, but I'd much rather live under the stars than in that.
For a much more encompassing discussion on design (which could include software architecture) this 1972 interview with Charles Eames is mind blowing:
When I took a graphic design class a while back, my teacher used the example of a pizza flyer. By any standards, they're not minimalist. They're full of garish colors and crowded with pictures--and yet, they work. Personally, I can say that I'm much more likely to buy from a place with that type of ad than one with a "minimal" ad.
Font rendering in my various browsers-> Chrome: horrific, Firefox: pretty bad, IE9: better, but still bad.
All MS has to do is put together a designer with good sensibility and one brainy dedicated developer, and have the developer tweak font code until the designer is satisfied and font rendering is just as good as Mac. Boom, the world on the web instantly becomes more beautiful for millions of people, or whatever. One big reason designers like Mac is the font rendering. Everything is wonderful over there.
Anywho, carry on.
How does the font rendering here compare? Its Firefox on Ubuntu 12.04 (actually using Gnome Shell). I've always found Ubuntu font rendering different to other GNU/Linux distributions, and I prefer it.
What we get on our Windows 7 / Explorer 9 desktops at work. I actually can't see too much difference between this and the grab from Ubuntu/Firefox.
If you can see obvious differences, now you know what you are up against when you talk to non-designers like me.
I should have made that clear - yours looks great comparatively and yes the ie9 and FF versions are close to each other comparatively.
Text is being occluded in the red circles; the FB stuff at the top is bigger than it should be; the credits to the right are too big. Here's my FF for comparison, which has the sizes right but bad rendering on the body text:
And chrome, being even worse with aliasing: http://i.imgur.com/zFcu1.png
I'll pop another one on later with a default Unity interface as the Ubuntu team intend
I've always preferred Ubuntu's font rendering over other distributions/oses.
Chrome on the other hand looks terrible for me, and no matter what I do I can't fix it.
The reason why this switch hasn't resulted in a simple "boom, instantly beautiful" improvement is a chicken-and-egg problem. The choice of which rendering API to use is made by application developers; they naturally want to target the one that's most widely adopted. But Vista/7 haven't driven XP out of the marketplace yet. So cautious browser developers stick with GDI.
You can see the result in the examples you cited. IE9 is a special case because it's only available for Vista and 7 anyway, so Microsoft was free to move it to DirectWrite. Firefox defaults to GDI, but as of FF4 has optional DirectWrite support (how to turn it on: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1775755). Chrome is GDI-only.
The title however, is a bit unfortunate. It's a touch condescending, something that designers should really try to avoid when trying to impart the importance of their craft on an audience. At all costs avoid any trace of snobbery. (We all know the pronunciation of 'design', for instance.)
More significantly, the article is not so much about how design works as it is about what design does. That's fine as a starting point, but it's precisely the method of design that multidisciplinary teams need to understand to create truly great products. Dieter Rams's principles are a good touchstone for critiquing one's work, but how those qualities are arrived at, i.e. the process, is the bigger issue and the real "how design works".
An article about how the design process can be understood by others and engaged with would be a benefit to the startup community: It's a huge challenge to create the methods and camaraderie that enable developers, designers, and other stakeholders to collaborate and iterate effectively.
NB: The site is very difficult to peruse on an iPhone.
The best solution I heard of was the concept of a "Simplicity Tsar" - a C-level independent observer with the power of veto on any product (internal or external) that doesn't make the user's life simpler. It's a shame more corporations don't buy into this idea.
Is the old '960px wide max for fixed width' rule out of the window now?
And that makes me wonder what the right edge is aligned to.
I know nothing about design. I guess I'm used to grid layouts and having everything nicely aligned, and this doesn't feel as if it is.
Pictures of different widths on the left are giving me too many different left margins for text. So, some of them are aligned with each other, but you don't see that because they're not all on the same fold.
Like technology you should never outsource your design completely. Its okay give some design assets to 99Designs etc. but not whole design job.
Note to OP: You tried to make this page really visually appealing, but it fails on interaction design. For example, those popups for short summary about Dieter Rams 10 principals are annoying and provide terrible UX. You have to wait for few seconds after clicking each box. Why not simple tooltips? Tooltips are not fancy but they are really useful.
HireMeIKnowHowDesignWorks.com
it's a nice love note to design, written by someone who has learned more css than information design.
the pie charts are terrible (i'm totally sure he interviewed dieter rams and asked him to put a numerical quantity on the importance of his principles).
I can't see a way anyone can interpret the data accurately from the charts he's written.
the pie charts are misleading, the bar charts use two different proportions of responses (engineers vs 'biz'). the axes aren't labeled properly (is it % is it number of responses).
2.) Pick tangentially related, but non-informative images (icons for interaction design).
3.) Ignore how the web works, e.g. incremental loading
4.) Pick low contrast colours for text, because that just interferes with the design.
5.) Ignore the simple thing that design is meant to complement and work with the product.
6.) Spread things haphazardly on the page so there's no natural flow to the content.
That's how this site portrays design as "working". And for that reason, I'm out.
Ram's 10 principles look interesting. However to read each summary, I had to click the button and wait for the popup. Perhaps the same space could have been used to display the actual text?
I don't understand how a company who does that so often, is so aggressive towards others that do the same thing to them.
Can you succeed without great design? Absolutely.
Does it help? Yes.
Is it needed? Well, some kind of design sense is needed. Does it have to be stellar? Does it require an official Designer/Artist? In some cases, yes and in some cases no. Depends on the business, depends on the software. You'd be surprised at how many people will pay you money just to solve a problem or make some pain go away, or to automate otherwise manual tasks. Don't all have to be purty.