Cute and fun. I'd try the app if it had this page.
As a working designer, there's a few things I love about this guy's approach:
* use real language, not lorem ipsum. Text is half of the design.
* branding is just as much about giving personality as it is choosing a visual treatment, like "playfully nerdy with Jedi references" here or "sleek VIP club" like with Exec. The people that ripped on last week's mocks don't get it - design is a conversation-starter. Don't like the exclusivity of the previous mocks? Cool, then let's hone in on what you do want and guess what, some stuff from previous iterations might carry over.
* go straight to high fidelity, none of this nonsense of wireframes and personas and other deliverables that many PMs and designers are obsessed with. If you want low fidelity to quickly brainstorm, it's what paper, whiteboards and Starbucks napkins were invented for.
* speaking of high fidelity, don't be afraid to use real textures and take a stab at the logo too while you're at it. Designers that swear they love Swiss minimalist grids as their style usually turn out to be like the bad contestants on Top Chef that get weeded out early on because their style is "rustic". Riiiight, it's not because you don't have the knife skills to do Asian cuisine, sauce skills to do French, or baking skills to do desserts.
* and the thing I like the most is that he took the initiative to just put something out there. Even when you're working in-house, sometimes you have to grab ahold of the conversation and ship something real, something people can sink their teeth into instead of spinning out into orbit with conversation. It's also very common not to know what you do or don't like until you see some alternatives. Hey, it's called being human.
And trust me, you can cool it with the disrespect angle. None of the targets of these redesigns feel disrespected, since everyone's dying for design help and even just a few spare cycles from experienced pixel pushers. I tried an experiment of holding office hours for just one YC batch (S11, because I'm friends with Jason from Ridejoy) and my last two Saturdays have been booked completely solid. And Justin reached out to me a few weeks back about helping Exec's visual design and we haven't been able to get together, probably because of post-Demo Day craziness, so how happy do you think he was to see the free mocks from last week? Justin didn't ask for any shady spec work, some guy was just fired up to help out on his own dime. Right on.
(thankfully there's less naysayers on this thread so far compared to last week's one about Exec, just a boatload of feedback on possible alternatives. Yay HN, reminds me of the days of old :)
Like I said, love it. This is the quality of work I get paid to deliver and if I had to break into design or the SF startup scene all over again, I hope I'd be smart enough to do a series like this. It worked for Dustin Curtis with American Airlines, Metalab with Zappos and even 37signals did it way back in the day when they were a design shop. They did some unsolicited redesigns of FedEx and other brands that led to a lot of client work for them. I read Jason Fried saying somewhere that it was a smart move for them and didn't get why more designers don't do it.
[edit: added the paragraph about unsolicited designs not being disrespectful]
Realized I was so busy I didn't get a chance to respond to last week's Exec redesign, but in general I was happy that Kyro took a shot at it and thought he surfaced some interesting ideas, and that it definitely looked much prettier than what we have today.
Unsolicited designs are definitely not disrespectful and are very much appreciated: I love to get other people's thoughts on what we can do better in all aspects of the business.
No. Prettier != better, as one other commentator pointed out. I think there were many things that Kyro did better than the current design, but his design wasn't something I'd be comfortable putting on the site in it's current form.
To address some of the points in the other thread: Yes, the current Exec design looks like something that was done by a non-designer in an hour. That's because it was, by me, the night before we launched. And I'm comfortable with how it works; when we have a full time designer in house they will iterate it based on achieving specific goals.
I don't believe in changing design for the sake of changing design or just having something prettier. I believe in design that achieves specific goals and functions, and that defining those goals and functions are actually the most important parts of the design process. Because of that, I do not believe that it is possible for us to use an outside design without first coming up with new goals for the front page. I don't want to invest my own time in doing that right now, because my time is extremely valuable and I don't think our crappy front page is our current bottle neck on Exec (actually, I know it isn't). So, any effort we made in improving it at the moment would wasted. So, I'm not changing it.
go straight to high fidelity, none of this nonsense of wireframes and personas and other deliverables that many PMs and designers are obsessed with
Nonsense? Right deliverable for the right place surely.
Doing a ton of hi-fi wireframes for a startup landing page? You're doing it wrong. Redesigning a large content based site and dropping straight into Photoshop? You're doing it wrong.
As for persona - great tool for understanding your users and getting alignment across the team. Waste of time if it's just you and two other people and you are all talking to your users every day.
If you look at the criticisms of Kyro's Exec redesign the root cause of many is that it's talking to a different audience with different concerns from the original design. Exactly the sort of problem that persona help with.
Of course Kyro didn't have any persona that the Exec team had built available (if they even exist) which puts them at a disadvantage. But maybe looking at the existing content on the home page, FAQ page, etc. and building an ad-hoc persona around that would have helped.
As a working designer, there's a few things I love about this guy's approach:
* use real language, not lorem ipsum. Text is half of the design.
* branding is just as much about giving personality as it is choosing a visual treatment, like "playfully nerdy with Jedi references" here or "sleek VIP club" like with Exec. The people that ripped on last week's mocks don't get it - design is a conversation-starter. Don't like the exclusivity of the previous mocks? Cool, then let's hone in on what you do want and guess what, some stuff from previous iterations might carry over.
* go straight to high fidelity, none of this nonsense of wireframes and personas and other deliverables that many PMs and designers are obsessed with. If you want low fidelity to quickly brainstorm, it's what paper, whiteboards and Starbucks napkins were invented for.
* speaking of high fidelity, don't be afraid to use real textures and take a stab at the logo too while you're at it. Designers that swear they love Swiss minimalist grids as their style usually turn out to be like the bad contestants on Top Chef that get weeded out early on because their style is "rustic". Riiiight, it's not because you don't have the knife skills to do Asian cuisine, sauce skills to do French, or baking skills to do desserts.
* and the thing I like the most is that he took the initiative to just put something out there. Even when you're working in-house, sometimes you have to grab ahold of the conversation and ship something real, something people can sink their teeth into instead of spinning out into orbit with conversation. It's also very common not to know what you do or don't like until you see some alternatives. Hey, it's called being human.
And trust me, you can cool it with the disrespect angle. None of the targets of these redesigns feel disrespected, since everyone's dying for design help and even just a few spare cycles from experienced pixel pushers. I tried an experiment of holding office hours for just one YC batch (S11, because I'm friends with Jason from Ridejoy) and my last two Saturdays have been booked completely solid. And Justin reached out to me a few weeks back about helping Exec's visual design and we haven't been able to get together, probably because of post-Demo Day craziness, so how happy do you think he was to see the free mocks from last week? Justin didn't ask for any shady spec work, some guy was just fired up to help out on his own dime. Right on.
(thankfully there's less naysayers on this thread so far compared to last week's one about Exec, just a boatload of feedback on possible alternatives. Yay HN, reminds me of the days of old :)
Like I said, love it. This is the quality of work I get paid to deliver and if I had to break into design or the SF startup scene all over again, I hope I'd be smart enough to do a series like this. It worked for Dustin Curtis with American Airlines, Metalab with Zappos and even 37signals did it way back in the day when they were a design shop. They did some unsolicited redesigns of FedEx and other brands that led to a lot of client work for them. I read Jason Fried saying somewhere that it was a smart move for them and didn't get why more designers don't do it.
[edit: added the paragraph about unsolicited designs not being disrespectful]