Square's culture: "That makes us look really bad." | Hacker News Reader

Square's culture: "That makes us look really bad."

clayallsopp.com

33 points10char12 comments

The big question was whether the guy was a designer or not (the feedback sounds like a designer). I run a small design and dev agency and my partner (The creative director) won't let wireframe documents out the door that don't look designed even if in any other way they're perfect.

This is the nature of designers, and doesn't, necessarily, reflect a corporate culture.

Funny, I wish Jack's other company would say the same thing right now.

Excuse my ignorance, but what made square look bad? I was expecting something, uhh, embarrassing, and found... A twitter feed?

It wasn't sufficiently Helvetica.

From what I can get, it's the design of the twitter feed. The article is attempting to show how deeply ingrained design and detail is in the company, along with being part of the team.

You'll often see internal tools will be the last place that design matters, because customers don't see it.

Yes, I'm not sure this is a positive thing about the company. I'm not buying design, I'm buying a service, and I am not sure design of an internal twitter feed would ever be something to blog about.

However, I am no designer, as it seems half of silicon valley is these days. Perhaps it matters more than I can see.

I think it is more about attention to detail than just design. It is just that design is how that attention to detail manifests in this example.

That's a very misleading title.

That blog post is ridiculous and makes Square look bad, so I'd say it's accurate. It may not be what the author had in mind though.

This observation reminds me a lot of my time at Twilio. I think it comes down to whether you have an owner mentality.

Took me a while for the actual thing-that-makes-us-look-bad to snap into focus here. Initially I thought it was having banks of monitors around the place full of "We are so awesome". Turns out the hagiography was in the wrong font.

Not just the wrong font, the whole list box is a mess. The spacing is the biggest thing, maybe then the font.

I'm at the developer-who-knows-bad-design-when-he-see-it stage, which is frustrating 'cause I what doesn't work and sort-of why but I don't really yet know how to fix it. Well, at least partly...

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