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Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

read.cv

231–240 of 367 posts

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#231

This is a good start, but I'm not a huge fan of this the way it is now. First, the font is tiny for my old eyes. Not all of us, especially hiring managers, are still in their 20s and can read these tiny fonts. I measured it with a ruler and the text is 1mm tall. Also, the font is gray on white, which is pretty but hard to read. In contrast, Linkedin is three times bigger and black on white, much easier to read. Secon…

Most of the content disappears when viewed in Safari's Reader View.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#232

I started read.cv when transitioning from full time to freelance design in July. I wanted an easy to update 'about me' page to link from my website and bio – something simpler than LinkedIn and more dynamic than a PDF. Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences,…

I would love to be able to embed the CV into a personal page so that it could link to the full profile on your site. I could picture it being the perfect link between a social network and private content.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#233
Andy, congratulations on shipping a product! It's a good idea and using .cv for CVs is a nice touch.

That said, here's how your website looks on my 27" 2560x1440 display: https://i.imgur.com/5dsRIlN.png

I'm sorry, but I have to be harsher than usual with my (granted, unsolicited) feedback now because you've been a designer for 11 years and I find your design - to be blunt - inconsiderate and inconsistent.

I hope you can school me on design in general by answering these questions:

1. Why is 3/4 of my screen empty space, while 1/2 of the content is invisible, forcing me to scroll down like I ran out of screen space? Seems inconsiderate.

2. Did you make this website for your own use, or for other people to use as well? If for other people, then why are you not accounting for the fact that lightgray on white is difficult to read in general, but especially hard to read for older folks? Seems inconsiderate.

3. What are the tiny circles with pictures supposed to tell me on the home page? They're just super tiny images with no information or tooltips. Seems inconsiderate.

4. Why do the "Create profile" and "View examples" CTAs look like buttons, but the mouse pointer is different when hovering on them? Seems inconsistent.

5. Why are you messing with the scrollbar to force me to scroll through the main CV? Seems inconsiderate.

6. Why is the "View example" button taking me to a page that wastes my time by showing me the exact same CV that I am forced to scroll through on the main page? Seems inconsiderate.

7. Why is the text on the main CV not selectable, yet on the "View Example" page it is selectable? Seems inconsistent.

8. Why are the links in the footer so close together? Seems inconsistent with the rest of the spacing on the page.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#234

I started read.cv when transitioning from full time to freelance design in July. I wanted an easy to update 'about me' page to link from my website and bio – something simpler than LinkedIn and more dynamic than a PDF. Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences,…

1. As others have pointed out, the default font size is way, way too small. Not readable on a phone, barely on a computer monitor.

2. Please try your site on an oldish iPhone, like an iPhone 7, in landscape mode. You give about 2cm of space for the scrolling content. The problem seems to be keeping the "View example" button anchored on the bottom of the screen at all times, with a large fixed border around the button. This leaves no room for the actual content. When you actually click "View example," the resulting page renders fine on a landscape iPhone.

3. Please try your site on a large 27" monitor in full screen mode. Your content's width is a fixed number of pixels and you end up rendered on a tiny sliver (about 1/5) centered horizontally on the screen. Please don't be one of those sites that has huge horizontal whitespace margins (I'm looking at you, John Gruber). It's a terrible web trope. Consider using the whole width of the browser window, or most of it.

4. I also agree that headshot photos should not be part of this product. Dare to be actually different from LinkedIn.

Please post here again after some iteration, this thing has promise.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#235
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around ten direct replies to your post and I still don't feel like the reason why pictures on CVs is a bad idea has been explained explicitly. I'm in the UK, where race, age, gender, religion, disability are among protected characteristics. As such, that information, should it be included, is often either stripped from the CV automatically or the CV discarded entirely to obviate the risk of being accused of discrimin…

But gender can often be derived by first name...

And ethnicity by last name, age by looking at the education section of the resume, etc.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#236
post #25

This is visually very attractive. Have you considered supporting uploading structured resume formats like FRESH? Edit: also I want to emphasize the fact that this looks great on mobile , which isn’t something I always expect in this space. That said I’d consider bumping up the text size a bit (or allowing users to do so for their own profile).

Would you be able to provide a link to the FRESH format you mention? What other structured resume formats are there in widespread use?

It took me more than a couple of Google searches for me to find it in the end, so here's a link to FRESH, in case someone else is interested: https://github.com/fresh-standard/fresh-resume-schema

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found). Functionally the website would be a wasteland of white sameness without portraits, no way around that I think. I'm not entirely convinced this service solves the linkedin pitfall of mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats and polluting the signal.

You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media, but you can present the information so that you’d first read the text and then see a photo. Move the photo on the profile to the bottom of it, and make it optional.

I agree - like only show a persons face AFTER you’ve connected somehow (I agree we’re hardwired to recognize faces - but I don’t want to try to recognize all the people as I’m browsing etc. - but when they become part of my Rolodex, then I wanna recognize their faces)

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#238

Andy, congratulations on shipping a product! It's a good idea and using .cv for CVs is a nice touch. That said, here's how your website looks on my 27" 2560x1440 display: https://i.imgur.com/5dsRIlN.png I'm sorry, but I have to be harsher than usual with my (granted, unsolicited) feedback now because you've been a designer for 11 years and I find your design - to be blunt - inconsiderate and inconsistent. I hope you…

That reminds of what - I think, not sure - Paul Graham once said, that what is applied to stupidity of the founders is just that they have little time and other priorities. Don't remember the exact quote. You are saying that Andy is inconsiderate in every other line. When most likely he had tons of other things to do. You can either make sure all your hover cursors and the spacing between links are consistent. Or you can ship.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steal their good stuff and leave their dark patterns behind. Their dark patterns make them money. That said, at this point, a LinkedIn competitor would look nothing like it...

Curious, what do you think a LinkedIn competitor would it look like?

I'm not qualified to answer that. Plus, I'm not sure I've seen it (obvious LinkedIn competition) yet, but there are shades of things that might upend the recruitment industry resulting in LinkedIn's cash cow taking a hit: Lambda School, Scaler Academy, EightFold.ai, Upwork/Fiverr, Creator economy etc

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#240

Andy, congratulations on shipping a product! It's a good idea and using .cv for CVs is a nice touch. That said, here's how your website looks on my 27" 2560x1440 display: https://i.imgur.com/5dsRIlN.png I'm sorry, but I have to be harsher than usual with my (granted, unsolicited) feedback now because you've been a designer for 11 years and I find your design - to be blunt - inconsiderate and inconsistent. I hope you…

That reminds of what - I think, not sure - Paul Graham once said, that what is applied to stupidity of the founders is just that they have little time and other priorities. Don't remember the exact quote. You are saying that Andy is inconsiderate in every other line. When most likely he had tons of other things to do. You can either make sure all your hover cursors and the spacing between links are consistent. Or you…

I see all this stylish eye candy on the page (animated transitions, rounded corners, dialogs with dark overlay) that takes time and care to implement, but there was just not enough time to make the text legible before shipping, eh?

It's clear that some of these were design choices and have nothing to do with shipping faster. The others are just inconsistencies that go against the general polish that the design aspires to convey.

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