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Not the tools I'd pin down, but in particular I am majorly against prefab themes like themeforest, and crowdsourced work like 99designs or crowdspring. You get

Not the tools I'd pin down, but in particular I am majorly against prefab themes like themeforest, and crowdsourced work like 99designs or crowdspring. You get what you pay for, and it's crap. I think both are a major insult to originality and craft that comes with quality design work - the exploitation of the latter, crowdsourced design work, just makes me flat out nauseous. that said, WordPress, from that list, is indeed the best!

tptacek 15y ago
Could not possibly disagree more strongly about Themeforest. Take the top 20 admin themes from Themeforest and compare them to the UI/UX of 20 randomly selected YC companies. Not the front page; the actual UI. Reasonable people will disagree which one wins. But what's crazy about that is that the Themeforest stuff costs twelve dollars†, and is available instantly. Desktop software developers don't have inferiority complexes about how samey their apps look. In fact, refined sameyness is a point of pride among Cocoa devs! But for some reason, every web app needs to be designed by Shepard Fairey and Khoi Vinh to launch. By all means, contract Fairey and Vinh. But do it after you launch the product and start making money. Your initial users do not give a fuck about this issue. If you are not a natural, fluent designer, you will lose tens of thousands of dollars of your time (and, worse, money) just so you don't look like someone else's CMS skin... which none of your real customers will notice. † Admittedly more if you need an all-purpose license, but still 1/10th what a designer costs.
- danielcrenna 15y ago
  Great call on Themeforest. The added benefit of using a prefab admin skin is that you can actually build your entire concept before you need to think about paying a designer. Many of the themes have a built-in grid system (if they aren't using 966 outright) so that you can build UI workflows after creating mockups. I have made this mistake in the past but would now never hire designer if I hadn't already built a working prototype of every screen, and for that I use ThemeForest HTML5 skins.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    As multiple designers will attest, I am more than happy to pay for design work (nothing we have up publicly came from Themeforest or 99designs). But unless your concept absolutely depends on graphical experience --- and look how shitty Pitchfork's site was for years and years and years in the trendiest most superficial demographic imaginable --- graphic designers are a terrible thing to block your project on. Rather than wrack my brain and carefully come up with a scoping document laying out all the pages and functionality in my next application --- a document that will be out of date exactly one customer meeting after I write it --- I'm just going to point my next designer at a $12 Themeforest theme and say "do this, but way better". I don't mind that it costs $5-10,000 to get "better than Themeforest", but I do mind losing weeks of release time sweating whether it's time to pull the trigger on a designer and what exactly to have them do. 99designs is a different story. I don't have the designer's moral problem with spec!work but the misgivings people have about quality and IP infringements are based on real issues. I still think it's a good tool, but I can see why some would avoid it. Avoiding Themeforest though seems crazy.
    - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
      The designers' aversion to spec work seems more like an attempt at collective bargaining than a true moral stance to me. I'm not saying that collective bargaining is necessarily a bad thing, but the success of 99designs and the like makes me think that they won't succeed in this age of globalization.
- chmike 15y ago
  Exactly. The article presents tools for minimal viable products for which Themeforest make sense. It is only if the project gets traction and eventually money that the logo and theme should be worked out more seriously.
- vbtemp 15y ago
  I recently got an item from themeforest (just a launching page). Even though it looks rather fancy, modern, etc.. (and I could never have made anything that nice looking by myself), I've found that integrating it into my project and tweaking it to be just right has taken far more time than developing something decent from scratch.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    This doesn't square with my experience at all. You must be much better at HTML/CSS than I am (not at all unlikely). For my part, it takes me roughly two hours to: * Copy all the static assets to their Rails-appropriate locations * Take the "demo" pages and get them to display reasonably as Erb templates of a Test controller * Convert the HTML to Haml * Move content to layouts/application * Break each feature in the demo out to a partial There is no other two hours I can spend that gets me as much UI functionality, so I'm a fan. I have done this three times, and each time found the work of integrating a Themeforest template to be easier than integrating work from graphic designers. I am careful to work with templates that are HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and that use a grid framework. I can imagine there are many hundreds of themes there that fail one or more of these checkboxes, and that might thus be a nightmare to work with.
    - danielcrenna 15y ago
      Cosign, I find it takes me the same amount of time to fold in a full theme into an ASP.NET MVC site using Razor. It's all just markup in the end, and whatever angle-bracket tax you're paying for server-side includes. Normally the most time intensive part is replacing paths to statics in CSS and HTML.
- marcymarcy 15y ago
  new to HN so not sure who sees my replies or who don't, but I should've clarified - what you're saying is what I agree with, in terms of prefab themes. it's just the spec work that gets me. that stuff isn't being sold multiple times like prefab themes. college students do spec no matter how much I yell at them and then end up (in terms of time spent) making so little an hour that it's just atrocious. but, time and a place, etc. and the type of work I do is very front-end heavy.... tends to go from mvp to beta launch quickly... and we have designers on staff. so, just spoiled. bad bias!
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I am advocating prefab themes. The price point for a very solid HTML5/CSS reasonably-semantic gridded admin theme is $12 to use and $600 for unlimited license. Even the license is a tiny fraction of the cost of any design project. I am very specifically saying that samey prefabness isn't a liability for web app UI; in fact, I think UX outcome is likely to be superior, since samey prefab admin themes that people will like enough to pay for are all the Themeforest designers tend to build. They're developing palpable expertise. The liabilities of these themes --- for instance that they are highly non-optimized --- are things that (a) do not matter until you have lots of customers and (b) are not particularly expensive to remediate with contractors after-the-fact. The liabilities of the DIY approach --- often, a devil's bargain between either waiting weeks or months to get a pro designer to pick up and complete a project, or going to market with a manifestly poor design --- are much higher. I think for most app devs, not using Themeforest is an expensive, irrational point of pride. It's not good business. This is a fairly recent revelation for me, so I'm being noisy about it.
Neputys 15y ago
Thank you for having brains. (designer)
- marcymarcy 15y ago
  I hope you're not being sarcastic! :) I wish I could do a general reply to everyone (new to HN) but I think I temporarily confused themeforest with themegarden (and similar.) Well, they are all similar, but it's mostly in WordPress that the prefab stuff really bothers me. For quick 'gotta get the point across' for html5 or trans to ruby or whatever, yeah, themeforest definitely makes sense. We deal with mostly very design-heavy, frontend-ish startups, where I work, so that may be why we hate spec and prefab work so much. We value originality but YES most definitely agreed, there's a time and a place for it!
tomjen3 15y ago
>I think both are a major insult to originality and craft that comes with quality design work - the exploitation of the latter, crowdsourced design work, just makes me flat out nauseous. The cup I am drinking from would properly also have been considered a major insult to some craftperson a couple centuries ago, but I am perfectly happy paying less in return for something that just works. As for 99 designs, can we please stop this exploitation bullshit? These people choose to offer their service there. What most people (not necessarily you) mean when they talk about the exploitation of the designers is that they press down the price - to which all I can say is, welcome to capitalism.
- Neputys 15y ago
  Good design is valued for it's impact. In other words it sells. Products, services and most importantly ideas. The thing that bothers me most is that people completely miss this point. They just want to order "some design". Witch is completely useless no matter how much u pay. Services like 99designs encourage this behavior in "designers" as well as clients. Or maybe it's better to say that they exploit it. There's nothing good about this, especially for clients.

tptacek 15y ago

Could not possibly disagree more strongly about Themeforest. Take the top 20 admin themes from Themeforest and compare them to the UI/UX of 20 randomly selected YC companies. Not the front page; the actual UI. Reasonable people will disagree which one wins. But what's crazy about that is that the Themeforest stuff costs twelve dollars†, and is available instantly. Desktop software developers don't have inferiority complexes about how samey their apps look. In fact, refined sameyness is a point of pride among Cocoa devs! But for some reason, every web app needs to be designed by Shepard Fairey and Khoi Vinh to launch. By all means, contract Fairey and Vinh. But do it after you launch the product and start making money. Your initial users do not give a fuck about this issue. If you are not a natural, fluent designer, you will lose tens of thousands of dollars of your time (and, worse, money) just so you don't look like someone else's CMS skin... which none of your real customers will notice. † Admittedly more if you need an all-purpose license, but still 1/10th what a designer costs.

danielcrenna 15y ago
Great call on Themeforest. The added benefit of using a prefab admin skin is that you can actually build your entire concept before you need to think about paying a designer. Many of the themes have a built-in grid system (if they aren't using 966 outright) so that you can build UI workflows after creating mockups. I have made this mistake in the past but would now never hire designer if I hadn't already built a working prototype of every screen, and for that I use ThemeForest HTML5 skins.
- tptacek 15y ago
  As multiple designers will attest, I am more than happy to pay for design work (nothing we have up publicly came from Themeforest or 99designs). But unless your concept absolutely depends on graphical experience --- and look how shitty Pitchfork's site was for years and years and years in the trendiest most superficial demographic imaginable --- graphic designers are a terrible thing to block your project on. Rather than wrack my brain and carefully come up with a scoping document laying out all the pages and functionality in my next application --- a document that will be out of date exactly one customer meeting after I write it --- I'm just going to point my next designer at a $12 Themeforest theme and say "do this, but way better". I don't mind that it costs $5-10,000 to get "better than Themeforest", but I do mind losing weeks of release time sweating whether it's time to pull the trigger on a designer and what exactly to have them do. 99designs is a different story. I don't have the designer's moral problem with spec!work but the misgivings people have about quality and IP infringements are based on real issues. I still think it's a good tool, but I can see why some would avoid it. Avoiding Themeforest though seems crazy.
  - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
    The designers' aversion to spec work seems more like an attempt at collective bargaining than a true moral stance to me. I'm not saying that collective bargaining is necessarily a bad thing, but the success of 99designs and the like makes me think that they won't succeed in this age of globalization.
chmike 15y ago
Exactly. The article presents tools for minimal viable products for which Themeforest make sense. It is only if the project gets traction and eventually money that the logo and theme should be worked out more seriously.
vbtemp 15y ago
I recently got an item from themeforest (just a launching page). Even though it looks rather fancy, modern, etc.. (and I could never have made anything that nice looking by myself), I've found that integrating it into my project and tweaking it to be just right has taken far more time than developing something decent from scratch.
- tptacek 15y ago
  This doesn't square with my experience at all. You must be much better at HTML/CSS than I am (not at all unlikely). For my part, it takes me roughly two hours to: * Copy all the static assets to their Rails-appropriate locations * Take the "demo" pages and get them to display reasonably as Erb templates of a Test controller * Convert the HTML to Haml * Move content to layouts/application * Break each feature in the demo out to a partial There is no other two hours I can spend that gets me as much UI functionality, so I'm a fan. I have done this three times, and each time found the work of integrating a Themeforest template to be easier than integrating work from graphic designers. I am careful to work with templates that are HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and that use a grid framework. I can imagine there are many hundreds of themes there that fail one or more of these checkboxes, and that might thus be a nightmare to work with.
  - danielcrenna 15y ago
    Cosign, I find it takes me the same amount of time to fold in a full theme into an ASP.NET MVC site using Razor. It's all just markup in the end, and whatever angle-bracket tax you're paying for server-side includes. Normally the most time intensive part is replacing paths to statics in CSS and HTML.
marcymarcy 15y ago
new to HN so not sure who sees my replies or who don't, but I should've clarified - what you're saying is what I agree with, in terms of prefab themes. it's just the spec work that gets me. that stuff isn't being sold multiple times like prefab themes. college students do spec no matter how much I yell at them and then end up (in terms of time spent) making so little an hour that it's just atrocious. but, time and a place, etc. and the type of work I do is very front-end heavy.... tends to go from mvp to beta launch quickly... and we have designers on staff. so, just spoiled. bad bias!
- tptacek 15y ago
  I am advocating prefab themes. The price point for a very solid HTML5/CSS reasonably-semantic gridded admin theme is $12 to use and $600 for unlimited license. Even the license is a tiny fraction of the cost of any design project. I am very specifically saying that samey prefabness isn't a liability for web app UI; in fact, I think UX outcome is likely to be superior, since samey prefab admin themes that people will like enough to pay for are all the Themeforest designers tend to build. They're developing palpable expertise. The liabilities of these themes --- for instance that they are highly non-optimized --- are things that (a) do not matter until you have lots of customers and (b) are not particularly expensive to remediate with contractors after-the-fact. The liabilities of the DIY approach --- often, a devil's bargain between either waiting weeks or months to get a pro designer to pick up and complete a project, or going to market with a manifestly poor design --- are much higher. I think for most app devs, not using Themeforest is an expensive, irrational point of pride. It's not good business. This is a fairly recent revelation for me, so I'm being noisy about it.

Neputys 15y ago

Thank you for having brains. (designer)

marcymarcy 15y ago
I hope you're not being sarcastic! :) I wish I could do a general reply to everyone (new to HN) but I think I temporarily confused themeforest with themegarden (and similar.) Well, they are all similar, but it's mostly in WordPress that the prefab stuff really bothers me. For quick 'gotta get the point across' for html5 or trans to ruby or whatever, yeah, themeforest definitely makes sense. We deal with mostly very design-heavy, frontend-ish startups, where I work, so that may be why we hate spec and prefab work so much. We value originality but YES most definitely agreed, there's a time and a place for it!

tomjen3 15y ago

>I think both are a major insult to originality and craft that comes with quality design work - the exploitation of the latter, crowdsourced design work, just makes me flat out nauseous. The cup I am drinking from would properly also have been considered a major insult to some craftperson a couple centuries ago, but I am perfectly happy paying less in return for something that just works. As for 99 designs, can we please stop this exploitation bullshit? These people choose to offer their service there. What most people (not necessarily you) mean when they talk about the exploitation of the designers is that they press down the price - to which all I can say is, welcome to capitalism.

Neputys 15y ago
Good design is valued for it's impact. In other words it sells. Products, services and most importantly ideas. The thing that bothers me most is that people completely miss this point. They just want to order "some design". Witch is completely useless no matter how much u pay. Services like 99designs encourage this behavior in "designers" as well as clients. Or maybe it's better to say that they exploit it. There's nothing good about this, especially for clients.