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Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

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Re: Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

#12
post #4

Wonderful design - I’d consider this to be brutalist design already! Too bad I cannot value the usefulness of the product, but it looks great.

Suprisingly to me to lot of people it looks bad. Same goes for Bloomberg which is similar. The reason why it is suprising to me is because this is how lot of the things looked in 60s and 70s. The medium/bold helvetica with clear colors coming from swiss design school. Lots of stuff used to be like this.

Re: Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

#14

A bit pedantic, but this is more product management. Not design.

I think the strongest Product Designers wind up taking on responsibilities that PM's might traditionally hold (and vice versa).

I'm fairly biased here, but I'd argue that product vision is often best executed in the hands of product designers rather than PMs. Having a design leader who takes the product or feature from high level goals, to flows & interactions, and finally down to the pixels often leads to a less-compromised end result. I usually find that singular vision beats design-by-committee.

Of course, this rarely happens due to company politics, which PMs tend to excel at versus designers.

Re: Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

#15
post #12
post #4

Wonderful design - I’d consider this to be brutalist design already! Too bad I cannot value the usefulness of the product, but it looks great.

Suprisingly to me to lot of people it looks bad. Same goes for Bloomberg which is similar. The reason why it is suprising to me is because this is how lot of the things looked in 60s and 70s. The medium/bold helvetica with clear colors coming from swiss design school. Lots of stuff used to be like this.

The problem with the design of this page isn't with the font, or with the decision to minimize decoration. The execution in that regard is done well.

The big problem is an aggressive blue (RGB 0,0,255) and similarly extreme Yellow (255,255,0). My eyes actually hurt when I scrolled to the bottom of the page and observed the yellow - there's a reason that these shades are reserved for CSS testing purposes only. This service is letting me know that they think their own time is too precious to spare a potential user a headache. It's not edgy or cool - it's entitled and lazy.

Lack of padding (aka breathing room) around text elements is a second but admittedly much more minor problem.

I would like a service that touts Design in the name to be at least semi-conscious of some very basic user-friendly design principles.

Re: Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

#16

A bit pedantic, but this is more product management. Not design.

I think the strongest Product Designers wind up taking on responsibilities that PM's might traditionally hold (and vice versa). I'm fairly biased here, but I'd argue that product vision is often best executed in the hands of product designers rather than PMs. Having a design leader who takes the product or feature from high level goals, to flows & interactions, and finally down to the pixels often leads to a less-com…

I agree with this but with a strong caveat. I believe product designers excel in B2C applications but aren't often as successful in B2B and Enterprise focused applications.

Re: Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

#17
post #3

Great concept! Minor feedback/nit: bottom of landing page is (c) 2016 in Aug 2018.

Copyright notices aren't there to tell you what the current year is. What would the point of that be? Everybody knows what the current year is. Copyright notices are there to declare when a creative work was created. That's when the copyright term starts. If you just set it to the current year you're lying about when the copyright expires and it renders the notice invalid (at least in the USA). In this case, you can…

Your statement makes a ton of sense. Assuming you’re correct, it is a bit crazy how many sites have the copyright programmatically set to the current year.

Re: Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

#18
For those others who tend to go to the comments before clicking through, these aren't tools for _visual_ design, they're for _product_ design - how to pitch your product, how to plan your MVP etc.

Glad to see these hit the front page, they were a big inspiration behind the product design parts of https://nichetester.com, particularly the idea of visualising a tagline by throwing it up on a T Shirt.

Re: Black Design – Design tools for early stage startup founders

#20
post #3

Great concept! Minor feedback/nit: bottom of landing page is (c) 2016 in Aug 2018.

Copyright notices aren't there to tell you what the current year is. What would the point of that be? Everybody knows what the current year is. Copyright notices are there to declare when a creative work was created. That's when the copyright term starts. If you just set it to the current year you're lying about when the copyright expires and it renders the notice invalid (at least in the USA). In this case, you can…

What happens when the created work is edited? Is there some threshold of trivial edits below which you can't change the year in the notice?

I mean presumably if you do edit it, people still have the right to use older versions when the copyright expires. But how does that play with the requirement to give notice?

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