Is It Wrong To Use A Svbtle Theme? | Hacker News Reader

Is It Wrong To Use A Svbtle Theme?

shkspr.mobi

37 pointsedent46 comments

TL;DR - It's confusing, but not a big deal. Change it or don't.

I, like you, at one point didn't know about SVBTLE. I clicked through links on HN and found some pages that looked strikingly similar and at a quick glance thought, "wow, this person is posting a lot." (Note: singular)

Then I looked deeper and found out they were different authors; I went even further and discovered some were a part of SVBTLE and others were simply using the Wordpress theme.

It was slightly disorienting, but then I got over it. I learned to recognize the real SVBTLE posts from the "fake" ones. Either way, I'm becoming a bit tired of the design.

There are a few stylistic differences between the real and fake ones. (font, for instance)

Also, the comments section breaks horribly with the formatting, as demonstrated in the original post. Although real Svbtle blogs don't have a comments section, which is disappointing...

People actually like the Svbtle theme, and they think that dcurtis is a positive brand?

Huh.

I think the entire point was that the author was - and is - neutral to the brand, and that the only reason he picked the theme was because he liked it.

Presumably like-minded people, such as myself (I actually love the theme), will be encouraging, while those who endorse the Svbtle club and its prerogative to "own" a simple, minimalist blog theme, will not.

Yeah, I didn't even know who he was before the Svbtle debacle. Now I know that he's some elitist who got pissy when his (not all that special) blog theme got copied.

He also got a designer at American Airlines fired when he ranted about their design on his blog. (The designer sent him a polite reply about what he was doing to improve the state of the design, but then AA fired him for no apparent reason.)

Wow, what a douchebag. There is no excuse for getting someone fired over something as petty as this. When he got that guy fired, he could have also been affecting that guy's wife and children, who are completely innocent and depend on the guy's salary to live.

He didn't set out to get the guy fired. There's no way you can justify calling him a douchebag for criticising a website's design.

I think it is safe to justify calling someone a douchebag when they attempt to claim ownership of a very generic style and concept.

He did say:

  Fire your entire design team, if you have one.
  Hire an outside design firm ... as quickly as possible.
  Your in-house team is obviously incapable of building a good experience.
  Get outside help. [1]

Then backpedaled [2] after he got a response outlining that he has no idea how large companies operate.

[1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html

[2] http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

I'm not familiar with this situation - was it a public comment? If so, discussion of the work you do for your employer - their intellectual property - could get you fired.

OP was confusingly worded. Curtis complained about AA's design, and the designer was fired.

You realize how many people in the valley have basically the same personality right? Not that I think this is a good thing, it just explains the love.

I'm very much not in the valley but, yes, I do like the look of the theme. Have no strong opinion of Mr Curtis.

We're now having drama over stupid blog themes? Who cares what theme you use, the only important thing is the content. Write it in a .txt and post it to dropbox for all I care - I'll be just as intrigued to read it regardless of style if the content is good.

To be fair, he is not the one who manufactured the drama:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373743

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4920905

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373565

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403236

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4881610

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3770722

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4881055

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744237

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4610042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713517

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744950

Thanks :-) As it happens, I was unaware of all the drama until I started researching the blog post today. I'm not interested in being part of someone else's drama. Hence the post.

Actually, if you're switching themes anyway, could you choose one in which the archive is more prominent? I couldn't find one, and usually the archive is where I go to find out whether the blog is relevant to me.

That's a good point. There are more than a few deficiencies of Svbtle - especially for a long established blog.

Any themes you're particularly fond of?

Particularly fond of, no. Actually, unless your topic is web design, I appreciate it if you're being unoriginal about your blog's appearance.

Trying to remember a few blogs where the content has distracted me from the appearance to the point where I couldn't remember what it looked like at all, I came up with blog.regehr.org and www.bunniestudios.com. The former uses the Barthelme theme, the latter looks like a default theme.

No-one should be able to claim ownership of minimalism. This pissed me off with the apple rounded rectangle patent; it's pissing me off more here. If Svbtle really wanted to establish a brand identity it would be easy - pick a logo, place it prominently on their blogs - and displaying that logo while not part of the group really would be wrong. But they don't own minimalism; no-one does. Keep using the theme.

There are a lot of minimalist themes that aren't confusingly similar to Svbtle.

I think there could be problems if we allow too simple of designs to be design copyrighted. Imagine if the first newspaper column layouts were copyrighted and enforced. There really are only so many grid structures that exist and make sense. Our eyes and how we perceive things are relatively the same, and so good design looks like good design.

And is there a difference between physical products and digital products? I don't really know, though if you download content that usually isn't freely available, then you might want to think twice to not accidentally be a hypocrite.

No, it's not wrong. The whole idea that it might be reeks of elitism. Use whatever theme you want, and let the "members only" Svbtle clique be judged based on the quality of their content, rather than their association with some self-professed blogging luminary.

I originally intended to develop my own variation on WP-Svbtle for my own blog, then I saw TwentyTwelve released with Wordpress 3.5. With a white background and a few other tweaks (such as moving the navigation bar below the header image), it can look very minimalistic and clean.

Here's my own blog customized with TwentyTwelve: http://minimaxir.com/

Looks good - have you released your customisations anywhere?

No, mostly because they're not very organized. Most of it is just CSS tweaking, though.

My personal opinion:

I'm really sorry, but your blog just doesn't look minimal and clean, and the type you're using for max woolf's blog thingy (I assume it's courier) just does not work at all (the apostrophe looks terrible, way too thick somehow). Also the blue is much too strong IMO.

It's the small things most dev's don't see, that svbtle really really gets right.

While I also dislike their elitism, I still appreciate the design work.

PS: The "Read More" button on the right is broken (if you click it, some margin or padding is lost ... It's the small things that matter...)

The font was Source Code Pro (monospace). That header image was somewhat old, so I just changed it now. :)

The high-contrast style of minimalism is what I prefer: I hate the low-contrast style that many blogs seem to love. Although I might tweak with it more.

The Read More bug appears to be from the original theme. urg.

At the time that the Svbtle "copycats" emerged my thoughts [1] were that it identified the differences between designers/brand people and programmers. Nate (who coded Obtvse) seems very much a programmer, whereas Dustin is a hands down designer.

In this case, WP-svbtle is, to most people, just a decent design. Dustin was hacked off by Nate's project because he was building a brand; and what seems a simple design probably took him some time to think about (like when I produce a 10-lines-of-code solution to a complex problem and a paper pushers says "so why did that take so long to make??").

Some of the comments directed at Terence seem unfair - assuming the worst, that he was aware of Svbtle and is cocking a finger at Dustin... Or passive aggressiveness about how common the design is now.

1. http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2012/03/copy-my-idea-not-my-des...

Totally wrong.

Svbtle is a brand. It's a minimalist layout, but copying it intrinsically suggests misleading your readers. You wouldn't make your new tech blog have the same theme as TNW or TechCrunch, and you wouldn't theme your Telescope install to look identical to HackerNews.

Isn't Svbtle itself heavily inspired by another theme?

After reading "I searched Alta Vista" I believe that his intent wasn't to rip off Svbtle.

I don't think it's "wrong". I would say it's "suboptimal" for what you might be trying to do. It's subliminally advancing another brand in service of yours.

Use whatever theme you want. Content should be judged on its merits, not on some blog "brand".

Most readers won't know svbtle, and of those that do, most won't think it adds any gravitas to the post. If I find a link rated highly on HN, that rating is the gravitas, not the blog's theme.

I don't think this post really answers the question. It tackles it more from the angle of "If you come across the theme without knowing about Svbtle, is it okay to use the theme?"

That's fine of course. You can't be blamed for not knowing about what is still a relatively small network.

The more important thing is what you do now. You now know that the theme was made to copy exactly the design of a network which is attempting to create a curated community, but it's very obviously a good design by itself.

It's your own choice whether or not you're happy with that. People will agree and disagree with you either way, but isn't that the point of a personal blog?

I don't think it's wrong. You can consider it just a "theme", but why don't you make something more personal for your blog?

Even few changes would make it look different: move the left bar to the right. Get rid of the rounded buttons, change the font.

Make something unique, you just need a day to fiddle with your css and make it look yours.

Borrow from the design, but don't copy it. I guess it's tough to draw the line somewhere, but copying front-end code crosses it. It's very easy to make something clean and simple without looking like Svbtle.

Just my $.02

I've come across a lot of posts in their network that are great, but I, like you, and many commenters here are confused as to how it works and how to get involved or follow what they are all up to.

Off-topic, but you searched AltaVista? Did you choose to use it specifically or is it your daily driver?

AltaVista is just a re-skinned version of Yahoo Search (which itself is driven by MSFT, but has some modifications vs Bing). So this isn't as odd a choice as it might first seem.

no, just uncreative

design is intellectual property and thus it's not ok to use it (or better "pirate" it) without permission.

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