Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

It's much easier to make it look "gorgeous" when the timeline is full of gorgeous people, beautifully photographed.

This seems like a pretty common mistake among designers. As a matter of fact, Facebook made this same mistake themselves not too long ago. When they release the "cover photo" feature, they showed off how great it looked when applied to a bunch of professional designers' profiles. When normal people started uploading low-res, vertically oriented images, it was instantly clear how silly of an idea the cover photo is.

Facebook seems to acknowledge this since now if you view a person's profile, it automatically scrolls past the cover photo so you don't even see most of it.

Cover photo a bad idea? Thats a weird thing to say because after facebook made cover photos available twitter got a header cover, then google plus, and even app.net... The cover photo tells a lot about the person

Sure, it does. But they're also overwhelmingly crappy for most "normal" folks: pixelated, blurry, poorly cropped.

Which is actually a problem with people. Attention to details, along with basic technical 101, seems non-existant in society at large.

Everyone copying Facebook's design decisions doesn't mean Facebook makes good design decisions...

Pretty sure google plus had cover photos from the beginning, which was before FB implemented them.

Maybe this has something with us having different friend types, but most people I know put quite acceptable, and in many case fine pictures.

I just uploaded a version with some crap instead [1], and it still works fine. These Metro styled tiles looks great whatever content you put in, the problem is the space wasted to achieve this look.

http://imgur.com/H9Tri

Lol at least it will confuse grandma

Hey, that's not crap. It's herp herp.

"it still works fine" is rather subjective. I much prefer Facebook's current and last design, from both a usability and aesthetic view.

Facebook is about displaying posts in descending order. This screenshot is way to confusing. It's too hard to follow posts. It may work for, say, Pinterest but it wouldn't work for Twitter and Facebook.

I'm waiting for someone to re-do the comps with crappy quality photos, ugly non-smiling people, meme pics, and instagram photos of garbage.

Exactly. Where are the Farmville, Bejeweled, <insert app X here> updates in this design exercise?

Oh and where are the ads?

There's an 'Ads' list element on the left under 'Favourites'.

Which no one would ever click.

I won't speak for anyone else, but better friends would certainly improve my Facebook experience. Unfortunately, I would be unlikely to improve theirs similarly.

To achieve this, I quit using Facebook.

The main problem I have with the stock photos is that they were all picked to match the color scheme. How is it going to look with random photos and clashing colors?

Couldn't agree more. And it kinda looks like Spotify to me.

Me too.

Came here to say it won't look as pretty when you replace all those photos with random images taken by random people from their phones but the parent beat me to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com