cemregr

MessageMe does this too. When I was installing it, it auto-checked 600 people and the default "next" button was going to text those 600 people.

LinkedIn's signup flow is similar.

AWESOME!

The next button could be way bigger though, I felt like I was trying to catch it every time :)

And maybe you can pre-focus on it with JS, so you'd give users the affordance that they can press enter to move on. (You enabled the right arrow key, but I didn't immediately know I could do it).

is this only for straight people for now?

Featured in Tech category is a YC reject :)

Would be great to see actual screenshots as opposed to blurred photos of hands holding iPhones showing screenshots.

Another way to sharp icon fonts (at least in Webkit) is using the SVG font format (placing it above ttf in the webfont stack). I demo'd this on my blog:

http://t.cem.re/post/21179547863/the-secret-to-custom-sharp-...

HN thread on "Startups, this is how design works": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3791427

I was expecting to see sketches and scribbles about the product. I guess this belongs to the "we skip product and just push pixels" school of design.

Can you tell me what other redesigns Github has done feel undesigned? I personally think Github has a pretty great design team.

This is premature optimization, considering you could spend your time optimizing things that have higher impact.

Paul Irish said related to this: "If aren't getting 90+ Page Speed scores, its way too early to be thinking about selector optimization"

http://paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/#comment...

(sees default twitter bootstrap button, closes tab)

I have an awful time using webapps that pretend to be real apps. I think it's mostly a performance issue. Choppy scrolling, sometimes layout gets stuck in odd ways, slow repaint when screen is flipped, text entry is awkward (keyboard unintentionally gets hidden).

Take Facebook's iPhone app, majority of its slowness and bugginess is caused by it being actually a web page.

You need a designer. One that can code, but that's still called a designer. I'm not sure if you can find that designer by advertising for a "frontend engineer with strong design sense".

Also, any good designer will balk at your request to "make it pretty". Design is not lipstick you can put on after the fact.

My suggestion: tell people that you're looking for a designer, and instead of "make it pretty", tell them you want to improve the user experience. Have them be involved early on. Making things pretty might be part of this job, but is not the only thing.

> We found that what we liked best in a Müller-Brockmann book or on the screen in photoshop was not what we liked best on real data. Photoshop type rendering is pretty poor, which is another reason going straight from print to code worked well for us.

Really good call to omit Photoshop altogether from design endeavors like this. It's a waste of time copy/pasting actual data into your comp, whenever you want to change part of your design, you have to repeat it manually with all the other elements on the page, the fonts render poorly...

We lately try to go from sketch to simple HTML mockups. Having actual data readily available while designing is such an eye-opener. Thanks to web inspector, we can tweak the styles and see the changes get reflected in the entire page. Sometimes when we want to play with the layout, we take a screen grab, cut and move things around in Fireworks.

Nicholas Felton, about the Facebook timeline design: "You can come into a meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it that way,’. But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks".

I don't understand how Photoshop is still considered a web design tool. Unless designing a marketing site with no content, it hinders good design more than it facilitates.

That page does mention some good design principles, then proceeds to just throw a couple gradients and Gotham on a Photoshop mockup. The HN thread about it discussed at length why it's a weak redesign.

Current design: "we built this in 10 minutes with twitter bootstrap to test our MVP".

Redesign: "this is a product, and a brand".

Also, very smart idea to do facelifts to YC companies. Many coming out of this batch have really weak design chops (the screen sharing site looked like an SEO landing page) and by focusing on YC companies, he increases his chances of being noticed. \

I reached out to a couple designers whose visual style I liked. Further along the conversation asked them to do a simple design exercise (to make a wireframe for a page based on specs and goals, and pay them for their time), at which point they ran away.

I'm not sure if startups need any more convincing that they need designers, and even at that, this page doesn't do a terribly good job at it by providing a nicely laid out collection of definitions from Wikipedia or uninformative poll results.

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)

with this many companies competing for attention, YC demo day feels like startup hunger games.

I think you meant it the other way around?

I really want to use GitHub for mac, but in my experience using it in conjunction with the command line doesn't work well. Just the other day I launched it to look at my diff before pushing, upon launch it complained about a non existent merge conflict, put me on master making me lose uncommitted changes, and resurrected some weird files out of nowhere into my working directory. I feel like every time I open it, it's a surprise.

Drew is one of the most prolific designer/developers around. I wonder if he ever sleeps. You should check out his other projects too: http://drewwilson.com/

This reminds me of this book "An eye for color": http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Color-Olga-Gutierrez-Roza/dp/00612...

The vast majority of all tumblr traffic is porn.

Grindr and Scruff. Heck, Scruff has even two separate $4.99/month features!

Weird, I am using two dating apps that have a monthly subscription that enables certain features.

I've been having trouble accessing this page for the last hour. Oh, tumblr.

I think it depends on where you work. I work at a large internet startup in NYC, and out of 250-ish employees we have, maybe only 10 are foreign.

Thanks. I didn't know you could delete things. I tried the same swipe to no avail.

Just of the top of my head I could say Paypal (when they started out) and AirBnb operate in legal grey areas.