Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A web designer with an attitude (he did his site while drunk)

alittlebitofsomething.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: A web designer with an attitude (he did his site while drunk)

#41

Post by codingthebeach »

csomar wrote: post #15

Well. This guy seems to be good at doing graphics. I like the graphics in the thumbnail he put. I don't like the sites design in the portfolio thumbs, but I need to get the full site URL and display it on my screen to be sure. I like how he presented himself and the website coding. There are two points, though: 1. Don't use images for Text. He can use cuffon or font-face 2. I need to click the thumb. Since the page d…

The industry's not quite to the point where you can get rid of text-as-images. @font-face is supported in maybe 50% of browser versions, requires several different font formats, and even if you get it to work uniformly, you still have to deal with licensing issues.

http://caniuse.com/#search=font-face

I agree you should prefer text to images of text, but sometimes you can't escape it. EDIT: And I agree that in this particular case, he could've just used appropriately-styled text. :)

Re: A web designer with an attitude (he did his site while drunk)

#43

Post by oldstrangers »

His websites look like every cookie-cutter wordpress "business" theme out there... Horrible, to put it nicely. His "graphic design" is no more than a few mouse clicks in illustrator on someone else's photographs.

Not even sure why we're talking about this.

Re: A web designer with an attitude (he did his site while drunk)

#47

Post by JoelSutherland »

codingthebeach wrote: post #41
csomar wrote: post #15

Well. This guy seems to be good at doing graphics. I like the graphics in the thumbnail he put. I don't like the sites design in the portfolio thumbs, but I need to get the full site URL and display it on my screen to be sure. I like how he presented himself and the website coding. There are two points, though: 1. Don't use images for Text. He can use cuffon or font-face 2. I need to click the thumb. Since the page d…

The industry's not quite to the point where you can get rid of text-as-images. @font-face is supported in maybe 50% of browser versions, requires several different font formats, and even if you get it to work uniformly, you still have to deal with licensing issues. http://caniuse.com/#search=font-face I agree you should prefer text to images of text, but sometimes you can't escape it. EDIT: And I agree that in this p…

@font-face actually has pretty incredible browser coverage:

Safari 5.03, IE 6-9, Firefox 3.6-4, Chrome 8, iOS 3.2-4.2, Android 2.2-2.3, Opera 11 (http://www.fontspring.com/blog/the-new-bulletproof-font-face...)

It does require different file formats, but these can be generated trivially:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

Re: A web designer with an attitude (he did his site while drunk)

#48

Post by unshift »

everyone wants to rag on the portfolio (fine, go ahead) but the long-form copy on that page is great. it's really well laid out, easy to read, and got probably everybody to scroll from top to bottom and read almost the whole thing.

as someone who's unsuccessfully been trying to coax something similar out of a designer, it's refreshing to see. my product requires a bit of convincing and explaining, so the standard business type website with a couple pictures thrown in isn't as effective. long copy is hard to get right and this guy nailed it.

Re: A web designer with an attitude (he did his site while drunk)

#49

Post by prawn »

amr wrote: post #27
prawn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This publicity is good publicity. Anyone who doesn't want to work with him had never heard of him before and will soon forget him. Anyone who might want to work with him, hadn't heard of him before.

ok, good point. However, based on my experience with HN, I bet the second segment of people you describe are under represented here. I generally see swagger discouraged around here so a strategy like this is not effective, even if it made the frontpage.

He's a no-name designer (not to be too disparaging) in a sea of no-name designers. A tiny percentage of a large (HN) crowd is still going to be a bigger audience for him than he might have got with a plain site.

I have more experience and a broader portfolio, but do you think anyone would have reason to submit my site to HN? Nup.

If the large percentage rubbed the wrong way by this were likely to rain his house with stones, he'd have a problem, but they won't. They'll move on to the next topic and forget him pretty quickly.

On top of that, he will get a more receptive crowd as this moves around Twitter and the like too.

I'd guess that big business or even medium enterprises won't touch him, but anyone needing a freelancer or with a start-up might. Those two groups would be reasonably well represented here.

Re: A web designer with an attitude (he did his site while drunk)

#50

Post by sjs382 »

DanBlake wrote: post #12

That guy sure is cocky, considering his profile consists of run of the mill/average website designs. Half of his portfolio looks like it could be from templatemonster.

I recognize the one in the 4th column, 3nd row from themeforest.net
Post reply on HN