21–30 of 67 posts
You have money to burn on a vanity exercise using experienced programmers but don’t even bother to hire anyone in the visual arts when designing it?
This is a cool project. I am amazed that there are companies this big that investing so much time into building what’s essentially a gimmick has positive RoI
There is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem in our line of business, in that we have to convince you that we're not just normal-software-company levels of trustworthy and competent, but trustworthy and competent enough for you to put us solidly in the middle of your revenue. Additionally, due to the way our business works, we might have to do that before you even have revenue. So we invest quite a bit in "the lit…
(the developers did an incredible job on that infographic and it's great)
‘None of us on the team considered ourselves 3D artists, so we leaned on each other, the internet, and friends to help solve technical problems.’ You have money to burn on a vanity exercise using experienced programmers but don’t even bother to hire anyone in the visual arts when designing it?
And even real products that would benefit from actual visual design might just "hack the visuals" together. So this is not that far out.
They do discuss hiring external resources if you read the article -
"If we had known precisely the globe we wanted to build, we’d have been foolish not to hire GlobeKit. Instead, not knowing what we did not know, we decided to figure it out ourselves. "
And they do have internal designers on the task as well-
"To start, the project’s design lead created the best approximation of her vision of the globe in Photoshop."
‘None of us on the team considered ourselves 3D artists, so we leaned on each other, the internet, and friends to help solve technical problems.’ You have money to burn on a vanity exercise using experienced programmers but don’t even bother to hire anyone in the visual arts when designing it?
What a shame for the 3D artists out there, but programmers will get their just deserts when GPT-3+ replaces them soon.
On a tangent, I do feel most GIS systems and applications still use 2d maps instead of a 3d globe, which I think could do with some rethinking. Working with globes could eliminate the whole apparatus of projections, and I guess would simplify a lot of calculations.. but there seems to be much resistance to this idea.
> Despite the impending release, an executive (it was Patrick) posed to us: what would you build if you had the time to do it the way you wish you could? Funny how CEO of Stripe is still participating in such (seemingly) low level decisions. Can't imagine that CEO of Ford for example would participate in new site design and development.
The problem with this is that those execs often don't have expertise in building these things and end up causing more frustration to the people supposed to do the job rather than being helpful. It is some form of micromanagement.
‘None of us on the team considered ourselves 3D artists, so we leaned on each other, the internet, and friends to help solve technical problems.’ You have money to burn on a vanity exercise using experienced programmers but don’t even bother to hire anyone in the visual arts when designing it?
Now only if UV texture-mapping was any easier, I would love to be in a position to call myself a 3D artist.
Luckily, procedural graphics (both geometry & texturing) has filled the gap for me.
Off course, the biggest school was working along with real 3D artists that shed light and introduced me to engine and shader optimization, my greatest passion at the moment (along with GPU parallelization).
These giant companies employ/stockpile vast numbers of elite programmers who they don’t really need. So they build other things. Nice work if you can get it.