I have never heard of ThemeForest before, but this site looks absolutely AMAZING! I feel i'm fairly capable of creating a design myself, but most of the time It probably is not the best place to put my efforts. This looks like a great way to get 70% of the effort done (only spending my time doing some slight tweaks).
Hiring a designer is a premature optimization
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Re: Hiring a designer is a premature optimization
#62Design is not just the way your product looks, it's how it works and how people interact with it. Unless you're building something without a user interface, design is a critical part of your product, and if you ignore it, you're setting yourself up for failure.
You don't need to have a degree from art school to be a designer, just like you dont need a CS degree to write code. You can learn the basic tenants of typography, grid systems, and usability on your own. Whether or not you hire a "designer," design thinking should be part of the process of product development from day one.
Re: Hiring a designer is a premature optimization
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. By design I also mean interaction with the product, animations, etc. Animations that you've written for the first design draft might not make sense anymore with the new design. So new code required. So is for markup and JS code. If new design requires new elements on the page, this may break your JS that relies on certain structure.
Animations? Did I miss where every startup is now a game company? Animations are an unnecessary complexity that get in the way far more often than they enhance UX. If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're doing it wrong.
> If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're doing it wrong.
I have to disagree. If you are slapping in some animation eye candy after the fact, you are doing it wrong.
Animation's purpose is to explain the environment to the user. An environment void of animation has to use other metaphors to explain the surroundings, leading to completely different designs. At that point it is difficult to start to incorporate animation with real purpose.
It is not necessarily bad to design an interface without animations. Some computer systems cannot easily support animations. However, animations can give you some design liberties if animations are a core feature of your design; to add them later is too late.
Re: Hiring a designer is a premature optimization
#64Using a downloadable theme on your product is somewhat akin to using Wordpress to program your web app. The compromises will be dictated by the CMS/Theme, instead of you being able to call the shots Say you need a tool to reorder categories. You know the best way to do this would be with drag and drop, but the theme only has table views! So you place an "order" field in a table view and hope for the best. Then you re…
Or you use the base styling to create whatever custom widgets you happen to need. The kind of themes I'd use in this situation give you reusable UI components and basic layouts that you can modify to your specific needs while still retaining consistency across the app.
My experience has been that a bootstrapping startup cannot afford to keep a designer on staff, and as a developer I'd much rather work with template components that are designed to be reused and moved around than a fixed design delivered by a contract designer that's not as flexible.
Re: Hiring a designer is a premature optimization
#65In my experience a designer isn't as much useful for simple designs or "look and feel" so much as the design process helps you along product-market fit. When my co-founder and I started building our company, we made sure we followed the process of user-centric design and took wireframes and mockups and photoshop files to our customers well before we even started coding. We would have completely missed our market if w…
I love your answer... Couple of questions. 1. When did you hire a designer for your iOS app? 2. Was the designer involved in creating wireframes? 3. Are you self funded? If not, then I think, hiring a designer would have been easy.
We are self funded, we didn't hire a designer for our iOS app, rather for a web-app that just went into public beta this past week.
Thus far we've funded ourselves out of client projects and a small grant we received about a year and a half ago.
Re: Hiring a designer is a premature optimization
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love your answer... Couple of questions. 1. When did you hire a designer for your iOS app? 2. Was the designer involved in creating wireframes? 3. Are you self funded? If not, then I think, hiring a designer would have been easy.
We are self funded, we didn't hire a designer for our iOS app, rather for a web-app that just went into public beta this past week. Thus far we've funded ourselves out of client projects and a small grant we received about a year and a half ago.
Thanks and good luck :)