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Show HN: UIDesignDaily – soft launch with 600 open-source designs
- choward 7y agoI just wanted to give you my first impression as someone who wasted really sure what the title meant. All I knew was that I'm a programmer that's terrible at design I thought this might be useful for me in someway although I wasn't sure exactly what this site was. Not knowing what "open-source design" meant, I visited the site and clicked the first design. I ended up on a page asking me to pay $60 for something. I closed to tab. I was really confused. Only after reading the comments here did I realize I must have done something wrong.Then I realized the first "design" isn't a design, it was a native ad. It looks like the designs but says ad instead of having a yellow gem. If I had just stumbled across this some other way and had the experience I would have closed the tab and never thought about it again. Sites that trick users into clicking ads are a red flag for me. Ok, so I clicked another design that had a yellow gem. All it did was give me a blown up image of the thumbnail. I still wanted to know what the open source design actually was. I almost clicked something off to the right thinking it would be a preview or something. Before I did though I realized it was another ad. It wasn't even labeled though like the one on the main page. The only thing left to do was click "download". I hovered over it to see what kind of file I was downloading. It didn't say since it's a button and not a link. So I clicked it. It was a ".sketch" file. Arggh! I knew that sketch was a Mac App and not open source. I don't have a Mac and I'm not using proprietary software unless I absolutely have to. I went the the front page again because I realized that I must have missed something. I didn't see that these were sketch downloads. Then I discovered there are multiple formats you could filter by. The front page just happened to have only all Sketch format ones visible at the moment. I guess I was just supposed to know the logo was for Sketch. I assumed the yellow gem meant that it was actually a design and not an ad. I had a hunch that the rest of the formats were proprietary to so I looked them up (by extension since the names of the apps are not mentioned anywhere, not even as title text on the images like they should be for accessibility). Yep, they where. It was at this point I closed the tab for good. My definition of open source is different from yours. If you can't open an open source file with open source software or if the file format is proprietary it's not open source IMO. I didn't mean for that to be such a long rant. I'm sure your web site will be useful to a lot of other people. It would be nice if the people it's not useful for could determine that up front. Not knowing all the product logos, it was pretty much impossible for me to determine what your site was for without wasting time clicking around. You did trick me into clicking an so mention accomplished I guess. Your welcome.
- andreigaspar 7y agoOpen source design just means you get the source file for the design. You can look under the hood, and see how it was made. Even more than open-source, the designs are also free to use, sell, or distribute in their original format or altered. Let's draw a parallel with open source software for instance. It just means you see the source, and have access to it. It might be written in a proprietary language, or using proprietary technology. That doesn't make it any less open source. Let's take Java for instance. It is a proprietary programming language, owned by Oracle - yet we have countless open source projects on GitHub written in Java... I could go on and on about this topic, but there is no reason for that, I don't think it will change your opinion. All I can say is I'm sorry if you feel tricked in any way, and on the bright side, the site contains open source designs that were made with free to use software as well. (Figma and XD) Thanks for your feedback, even though we might disagree on certain points I think there were some valuable takeaways in your rant.
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey, OP here. My wife got into a daily design challenge in March 2016, and she's been doing design practices every week day for the past 4 years. I helped her set up this website to share her work and maybe generate some revenue if all goes well. UIDesignDaily https://uidesigndaily.com https://uidesigndaily.com She uploaded the first 600 designs, currently at day 1059. Hoping to catch up with all the uploads for the official launch. I’ll get back with some stats and numbers about this soft launch if you’re interested.
- sosuke 7y agoI'm impressed you've been able to keep up with 1 a day. It is always interesting to see new UI ideas. Seems like all the time I need some UI or layout that I've never seen before. It all boils down to combining many other UI ideas.
- andreigaspar 7y agoThanks a lot, I'm really glad you found it useful!
- kohtatsu 7y agoYo the native advertising is super deceptive on this. I figured it was an ad she made, not an ad ad. Don't they track that your outbound click performance? Either way please address it; it's not good for the planet.
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey thanks for the feedback, we'll address it for the release!
- andreigaspar 7y agoThis might be a long shot, but could you send a reference of the type of advertisement you would be comfortable with?
- 7y ago
- swat1508 7y agook keep it up
- andreigaspar 7y agocheers
- themesberg 7y agoAwesome designs! Good job.
- andreigaspar 7y agoThanks a lot!
- marknadal 7y agoGorgeous work! Such a great blessing & story, thanks for sharing.
- andreigaspar 7y agoThanks for the kind words and positive vibes. Glad you like it, and I hope it will be useful!
- thetanil 7y agonice designs, don't like the site. modal popups covering content bottom left, signup pop under my mouse when i tried to download, a bunch of icons and I don't know what any of they mean except the adobe ones. I clicked download and I was astounded that a download dialog popped up and not a newsletter signup. I guess that's coming. obnoxious
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey thanks for sharing your thoughts. She tried her best... it will get better, just needs some constructive feedback and some work.
- redstripe 7y agoThanks, I'll bookmark this. As a programmer with no design skills, I maintain a folder of screenshots from various SaaS apps that I find helpful whenever I need inspiration for layouts, information presentation, multi-step interaction breakdowns, widget use, progressive drilling down, etc..
- andreigaspar 7y agoI'm really glad you found it useful! I'm deploying a blog for her too, if you have requests for UI/UX breakdowns let me know. Or you can just jump into the slack channel anytime and say hi!
- hizxy 7y agoKnow your user. Don’t blindly copy designs.
- adrianmsmith 7y agoAn advantage of copying designs, for your user, is your user will already be familiar with them. (In contrast to coming up with something original.)
- hizxy 7y agoNot if it’s the wrong thing or something they don’t need.
- krat0sprakhar 7y agoAwesome work! Thanks for sharing it! Keep it up :)
- andreigaspar 7y agoThanks for the kind words, I'll pass on your message :)
- all_iv 7y agoAwesome work. Applaud the effort of collecting these assets. Small note: when I tried browse and click some color palette the popup sometimes just show up. Don't know if that's intentional but I did not expect that.
- andreigaspar 7y agoThanks a lot, hopefully you'll find it useful! Yeh, that's my genius feature, it is triggering with a delay lol. I think I'll increase the delay or something. Sorry for the inconvenience, I've been told it's pretty frustrating :P
- elkos 7y agoA great open-source resource. To be honest I would appreciate if the project would prefer an open-source IM solution like Matrix, IRC or Mattermost.
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey, thanks for the encouraging feedback! I never considered that btw, will look into those :)
- Grollicus 7y agoOn the license page, the link in "For more information read the Terms of Service." seems dead to me. Besides that, this looks really nice. Hope it gives some success! Simply as a list of pictures to scroll down and be inspired by it might be really helpful. Thanks for sharing!
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey thanks for the heads up and the kind words! She will soon release the blog too, maybe the list of pictures could be in the form of blog posts! (it's a bit easier to manage)
- hbcondo714 7y agoI've been using uimovement.com for this kind of thing but the more design inspiration the better, IMO. I clicked the Payment tag and only got 4 designs back but only 2 pertained to payments. It would be nice to see more as I'm sure there are a lot of SaaS companies looking for design inspiration for capturing payments.
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey thanks for the feedback! A few hundred files to be uploaded still, so there's a good chance more payment designs are on the way!
- wolfhumble 7y agoCongratulations, looking great! One thing, IANAL, but it seems like the license page https://uidesigndaily.com/license https://uidesigndaily.com/license (linking to 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported') says that it is okay to: * "Not give credit . . ." * "Distribute, sublicense . . ." Whereas 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported' says: * Must include copyright * That you cannot Sublicense See: https://tldrlegal.com/license/creative-commons-attribution-(cc) https://tldrlegal.com/license/creative-commons-attribution-(... As IANAL, I don't know how things stand legally when your license page says something, but the License it refers to says something else, but that might be something to look into? Again great job both of you and especially your wife! :-)
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey thanks a lot! That's a great point, I'll bring that up to her and forward your thoughts. Which license would you recommend that is more in line with the license page statements?
- curben 7y agoIf credit is not required, looks like a public domain thing. CC0 [1] is one, there are also some other public domain licenses [2]. [1]: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ [2]: https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ https://choosealicense.com/appendix/
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey thanks a lot for the resources! Choose a license is a life saver man.
- wolfhumble 7y agoSounds like you give a very permissive way to use your designs, so maybe the MIT license (e.g. used for Rails, see. https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/MIT-LICENSE https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/MIT-LICENSE). But that requires a license and copyright notice, which you do not seem to require. So I am not sure. Maybe someone else can chime in? :-)
- kemonocode 7y agoThis is actually a really good resource! As a (mainly) backend dev that has had to increasingly do more frontend work than I'd be comfortable with, I have to admit I'm rather... design-challenged and more often than not I want to look at something someone with a clue has made to get some ideas about what I can/should do.
- andreigaspar 7y agoThanks a lot for the feedback, I hope you'll find it useful! A few more hundred files still to be uploaded!
- zupa-hu 7y agoI have to say I totally respect her endurance. She is pretty good too. The about page encourages people to get in touch. I did, 20 days ago. Maybe its buried in her spam folder?
- andreigaspar 7y agoHey thanks a lot, yeh she's really something! That might be so! I'll give her a heads up. Would you like me to give your contact to her?
- zupa-hu 7y agoYes, please do! My email is in my profile. (Just updated to match the one I wrote from.)