irondavycole

And why wouldn't they? They're explicitly an homage to a photo that hundreds of thousands of people (especially those in the startup scene) saw.

Promoting their own event is not without self-interest, even if the poster sales aren't directly profitable.

Also, it's not authorship over "red on white" as a concept, it's authorship over this specific combination of type, size, layout, & copy that implies association with Facebook. If they just wanted to maintain the message, and not the association, they wouldn't have kept the visual style. Implying an association (with Facebook, or Ben) that isn't really there is the dishonest part.

Designer of EtherPad here. I'm a big fan of HackPad and I encourage people to give it a shot. I get a lot of questions about the best version of EtherPad out there, and HackPad is the one I recommend.

It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.

Yeah, we're invite only right now so our sales & sign up flow is only given to people we let in. There's an application form if you're interested.

The pricing isn't a secret though, just not advertised. Memberly takes 5% (like Kickstarter) and then Amazon takes their payment processing fee which varies according to volume but is typically 2.9% + $0.30.

Not yet, we're focused on the provider workflow side of hte product at the moment. The discovery end will come later, when we have more momentum. We're only working with providers that drive their own traffic right now.

I'm a designer at Memberly — this is precisely what we do. If anyone has any questions/interest, feel free to contact me (email in profile)!

I did some UX consulting for The Colbert Report that required me to research their entire writing and production workflow and my understanding is that the executive producers of the shows might check in with each other, but it's true that there's essentially no overlap, and there's no effort to coordinate topics.

Designer of the site here. (Thank you for the kind words.) We wanted to do something upbeat and positive, a kind of join-the-movement and do-your-part vibe. If it were a story just about Amit, we might be more dire, but this is a much bigger cause and we wanted to express that.

Was the iPad client not developed in-house?

Fans of OMM might be interested in the Wikipedia drama surrounding the OMM article deletion:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/02/old-man-murray-de...

I have no dog in the fight, Wikipedia arguments are dizzyingly pedantic, but I found the conversation interesting.

Yes! I would absolutely participate.

I don't even think it takes knowledge of implementation, just respect for it. I've had engineers ask me to fix certain design problems that would take weeks of prototyping and user testing to actually nail down in a meaningful way. Good devs appreciate the difficulty and we find a solution that fits the schedule, bad devs think design is easy to do. It runs both ways. Let's avoid making needless blanket statements and concentrate on working together.

You're suggesting that "mister visual UX dudes" (like me, for example) don't take complexity of implementation into account when making design decisions. We do. It's part of the process. Note that he said to send the designer the e-mail, not the developer. The designer on a project should always know where the current UX problems in the product are, even if they are too expensive to fix at the time.

Their criticism stems more from the "don't make me think" philosophy. If you're quickly fetching something from the kitchen, it's totally understandable if your mind is elsewhere. It's not so much that it's impossible to know if it's on, it's that it could be much, much more obvious.

This is analogous to a row of unlabeled buttons that only show their meaning on hover. Sure, if the user stopped for a moment and surveyed the scene, it would be possible to know what everything does. But to what end? There are no benefits and the cost is high: you interrupt the user's train of thought. More on that:

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/help-your-train-of-thought-i...

The paradigm of the pagination, and the idea of a system for programmatically creating editorial layout is definitely worth stealing and I think it's fully fair to build products that do this.

What would frustrate me if I was at Flipboard is the aesthetic similarity. It actually looks like a Flipboard branded product, due to choices in color, layout, format, and typography. That's not building on the innovation of Flipboard, it's building on the identity of Flipboard. The only real benefits of that:

* Skipping the process of developing a unique identity (lazy)

* Not having to have a vision to develop a unique identity (uncreative)

* Gain unearned associations with Flipboard (pathetic)

These are definitely UX methods used by practitioners in larger workplaces/agencies. The issue is that most startups don't have a UX person that focuses exclusively on UX. For better or for worse, there aren't many resources given to UX in startups so the person (it's usually only one person) that is responsible for UX is often also responsible for UI, visual design, branding, marketing, HTML/CSS, etc.

So, someone in that role has to condense each field of work into their most efficient/cheap forms. Formal UX processes like wireframing, rapid prototyping, and user stories can directly result in product decisions.

Other tasks are meant more for gathering inspiration, forcing lateral thought, challenging assumptions: exercises that inform product-level decisions. While that's very valuable, many startups already have a fairly clear path determined by folks from the engineering or business segments. The designer is usually taking pre-determined product decisions and crafting them into something usable, attractive, cohesive, marketable, and high-conversion. No easy feat, but not quite where unfocus groups are helpful.

This isn't what I would necessarily describe as ideal, but it is how it often works in my experience. I would hope that the fuzzier UX processes find a home in startups but I don't often see design having that much of a priority, in terms of resources allocated or level/stage of input.

There's also an iPhone app for this called Daily Deed.

For (a) I would recommend Mark Boulton's book, Designing for the Web, which is available free online:

http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/index.php

It has really competent sections dedicated to aesthetics: typography, color, and layout. That he made it free is unbelievable. It's a resource I always recommend to the developers I work with (I'm a designer) who want to understand more about design.

As a designer, I highly recommend this book. It's beginner level but very comprehensive.

This is the problem with most SM articles and with most web design sites in general. I say this as someone who is featured in this post. Portfolio sites have a perfect reason to be minimal: the work comes first.

But that's what you get from an article that takes an aesthetic and works backwards — the exact opposite of a good design process.

I've been playing SID for the past few days. The interface is fairly confusing but the 'gameplay' is absolutely fantastic. Highly recommended.

At first the 30 second limit seemed outrageous, but once you find the rhythm it makes for a really engaging experience. You start becoming less ambitious and the scenes tend to become more driven by dialogue and character. A great decision on Rohrer's part.

When you buy the game, you get two licenses so you can send a copy to a friend and start playing immediately. There are also player matching sites springing up like sidtube.

Fugly is up for debate (one probably not worth having).

Confusing I'd like to hear your defense for. I don't personally find it confusing.

Regardless, what is a better measure for the success of a product's interface than its ability to support a company's objectives? Amazon's site is doing just that.

A lot of my UI pals disagree, but I think the guys at Amazon and CNN are killing it, certainly operating at the highest level.