6 ms·

Designer News is dead

160 points by ohjeez 3y ago

levmiseri 3y ago
Designer News used to be an amazing community I used to visit almost as often as HN nowadays. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it. Dribbble is another such site that designers used to aggregate at, discuss, share interesting ideas and engage daily. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it.
- kareemm 3y ago
  How did things change after they were bought?
  - samsolomon 3y ago
    I think most of the original community agrees that the combination of moving from invite only to open registration along with a lack of better moderation is where things started coming apart. And that’s not to blame the moderators. I think they did the best they could. But with the onslaught of spam, they needed more of them, more dedicated (paid) and better moderation tools. They got none of that though. You can see how that turned out in the screenshot on my site. That’s the front page with crypto spam.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
robertlagrant 3y ago
> The team viewed the move away from skeumorphism as a more honest approach to design. This is a nitpick in the grand scheme of this topic, but I wish this sort of language wouldn't enter the discussion. Most of what's discussed is fashion: skeuomophic/flat, neither is honest or dishonest. It's at such a high level of what they might term dishonesty that it's meaningless. Honest would be manipulating raw bits and everything else is dishonest? We don't need a moral reason to make a fashion change. "It's what other popular products are doing and we're following suit", or "we want to stand out so we're going with this" are perfectly fine. Everything else is imbued fluff.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  I also take issue with the idea that non-flat means skeuomorphism. That false dichotomy robbed interfaces of a lot bandwidth. Our visual system is designed to operate quickly, on a 2D field with 3D effects. The latter aid both our fovea and peripheral vision in quickly categorizing, grouping, distinguishing elements and their roles. They are a significant help even when we only use one eye and only see a pure 2D field. Careful use of color, shading that raises, lifts and sinks visual areas, textures, boundaries and other cues that demark coherent interface objects (is that editable text? a button? non-editable text?), smooth motion reflecting state changes, is not a misguided attempt to pull non-useful elements of our 3D world onto the screen. It is sensible design for the sense system that is being interfaced with. Similarly, making many user interface elements invisible until somehow discovered is not "simplifying".
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Died long ago when their mod team banned people who actually used it.
dmalik 3y ago
I used to visit but stopped years ago. Just not enough content on the topic I think. My replacement has been sidebar which is nice because it a curated top 5 links a day. sidebar.io/
globalnode 3y ago
Kind of unrelated but this story sounds like the way I feel about most of the internet and TV nowadays. Its just bots and marketers talking to/past each other. Now I know there are quality sites out there (HN for one!) but they are very hard to find.
samsolomon 3y ago
Author here—some of you old-timers may remember when the LayerVault team launched Designer News here back in 2013—almost exactly 11 years ago. Sadly, yesterday it went offline. Thought I'd share for any of the designers or UI engineers here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091763
- praisewhitey 3y ago
  Interesting to see people were complaining about low quality comments from the beginning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093253
- ianwalter 3y ago
  Thanks for writing this. I don't remember why I stopped visiting DN a long time ago, but a reduction in quality content makes sense.
  - edu 3y ago
    Agree, I used to visit it daily together with HN, but at some point it stopped having interesting kudos. To give it a positive spin, huge kudos to @dang for his amazing work at keeping HN great!
webwielder2 3y ago
Odd not to note that it was clearly created as the design equivalent of the engineering- centric HN. In general I found the discussions pretty shallow and anemic compared to HN, even during the supposed golden age.
Bjartr 3y ago
A shame, this is the first I've heard of it.
kvczor 3y ago
oh wow. I used to visit this page everyday and completely forgot about it until today.
karaterobot 3y ago
> If you’re a product designer or were a regular on Designer News, where do you have product discussions online? I’d love to find a replacement. Hoping to get an answer on this one myself.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  I'm not a designer but have gone through similar things in my own niches and honestly I just decided to stop talking about things. It wasn't really healthy or useful the way in which I was talking about those things anyway. I think it feels like we almost need to constantly discuss our ideas about our craft or hobbies to an audience, but I've really enjoyed letting go of that and just focussing on my own stuff.
- dorian-graph 3y ago
  It's not quite the same, but, https://read.cv/explore https://read.cv/explore is fun and interesting to see what people share.
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    And they also have this https://posts.cv/ https://posts.cv/
- vogt 3y ago
  Can't believe I'm saying it but twitter has become the main spot for me. Read.cv as others have pointed out is also good. Way less signal and noise than X of course, but the content is almost always very high quality.
- wilg 3y ago
  Same, I don't have any regular places besides random blogs to learn about design stuff from people who really care. Any recommendations people have would be very welcome!
- taitems 3y ago
  "Design Twitter" is the only reason I haven't deleted my account yet. Yes, Twitter is full of toxicity and can easily become an echo chamber -- but if you actively set out to create one it can be a unique positive. Bear with me. I follow a range of designers and front enders from the early Dribbble days and basically haven't added many people since. Yes it might be "polite" to follow back friends and colleagues who follow you, but it disrupts the balance. I don't even follow my own parents back because it introduces a bunch of off-topic content.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Community is hard. And requires moderation. DN was a disaster of spam and grift and died much longer ago in actuality.
- rchaud 3y ago
  I created an account in 2018 and barely visited as the top links were always so spammy. Felt like Steemit or one of those unmoderated Reddit-like sites that look like a link dump for every growth marketer in the world.
droobles 3y ago
I started my career as a print designer and hung around designer news, helped me into my transition to digital and then ultimately as a developer!
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
I’m sad to read this. I enjoyed Designer News many years ago.
- ehwhwhwhahhwh 3y ago
  [flagged]
davidbarker 3y ago
I used to visit Designer News daily, and became one of the mods. It was fun for a while, and surprisingly took more effort than I expected — I felt quite a lot of pressure to make the right decision when it came to downranking stories, banning users, etc. Then, over time, it started to feel like the people higher up were less and less interested in the site, and no amount of moderation could fix some of the issues like the amount of spam. I had a brief moment a couple of years ago where I went back to the site, cleaned up the spam and low quality posts I could find in the top few pages in the hope that it might kick off some kind of resurrection. It didn't, mainly because hardly anyone except spammers were posting to the site at that point.
- loceng 3y ago
  It definitely seems like there needs to be a vested financial interest, where a larger and highly profitable organization like YCombinator and its portfolio of companies, are willing to fund operating costs. I feel for dang sometimes here on HN, it's far too much workload for a single individual - even with the crowdsourced mechanisms (which I don't think are designed well) to help facilitate his work managing the moderation of HN. I think YC could afford to drop more $ on forum moderation to improve efforts, however the organization seems fairly conservative in nature, and HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that, giving an overpowered weight to users to influence posts' and comment visibility who aren't necessary that critical in their thinking, are more reactive than responsive - and so I'm uncertain if or how many years it may take for the same concentration of higher quality conversations on the whole, relatively speaking from the past and now, to return.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    > HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that Which rule? Pointing out suspected shills or complaints about bad use of down- and upvotes? My understanding is that those rules are about specific complaints in the ongoing thread. Not a ban on discussing them in general?
alberth 3y ago
Any good alternatives today? E.g., what’s the “HN” for designers?
- antidaily 3y ago
  No. And Dribbble (now owned by same company as DN) sucks now too.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  HN. Splitting off a sliver of a community isn't necessarily viable, but that sliver is alive and well on HN and posts about design that are interesting tend to get upvoted, but not a whole lot of those posts are made. It takes effort and that's in part why reddit is so successful, there is enough traffic overall that niches can flourish that would never succeed as a stand-alone website. HN solves this problem by not having categories, which is another valid path. But to make a 'HN for designers' is DOA unless you are willing to put in a lot of time, effort and probably money to attract and retain an audience.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Yes, HN is moderated, meaning that design topics, however rare, do attract discussion. Unfortunately some of that discussion is of the "designers have too much power" variety, but you have to take the good in with the bad.
  - davidivadavid 3y ago
    Pretty sure HN is one of the worst places to talk about design on the internet because its population seems oddly averse to the concept, tends to deride it as the useless whimsy of decoration-obsessed simpletons, and in general has nothing valuable to say about it except for its own obsessions with nostalgia-inspired tech aesthetics. It would be okay if it were just that, but coupled with the classic god-complex engineer attitude blaming every problem in the world on designers (you're a "manager"? take your number, you're next) it just makes for a very cringe experience for anyone who cares about design discourse.
  - solarwindy 3y ago
sunjester 3y ago
Never heard of it.
- rafark 3y ago
  Me neither. But it seems like it’s another (at least formerly) independent site gone. It’s sad to see the modern web being dominated more and more by the big players (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, reddit, Amazon, etc). I’m not even old (I’m in my twenties) but I still remember reading lots of good independent blogs and forums not too long ago.
  - personalityson 3y ago
    Thats why it died
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
taitems 3y ago
There's a name I haven't heard in a while! DN was fun for a very brief moment. But really, it died so long ago I think someone flat out forgot to tell it.
pmzy 3y ago
Like many of you, I haven’t visited DN in a long time. Though I liked it. This post gives me nostalgia. RIP DN
lastdong 3y ago
Totally missed Designer News, but getting a glimpse of what it was through the Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150618094329/https://www.designernews.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150618094329/https://www.desig... In a way, it does feel like HN as someone point out in another comment
fakecontent000 3y ago
[dead]
kristiandupont 3y ago
Like many others in here I had completely forgotten about DN. I don't think I stopped visiting it because of declining quality though, but rather that the concepts and principles of good design proliferated. A decade ago I still had this feeling that design was a secret world that I wanted to grasp but which felt out of reach somehow. Today, for better or worse, the essence of what we've learned is embedded within components, templates, frameworks, and examples, making the web predominantly aesthetic. It's more uniform which is boring, but I think the era of changing trends is more or less behind us. However, industry-specific differentiation persists—a fashion retailer's site diverges from a SaaS platform's landing page, yet each conforms to the norms of their niche.
- noduerme 3y ago
  > the era of changing trends is more or less behind us I find this statement very odd. Even if everything had somehow reached a state of near-perfection, the history of the web (and fashion, architecture, etc) seems to me to be an endless series of proofs that as soon as a period's worth of designers think that the arguments have been settled and all theories have been tested, some new trend (or a resurrected ancient monster) will come along and totally upend what's popular. I think this happens if only because young designers need to rebel. Ten years from now we might be living in a new era of glossy jelly buttons or steampunk or chrome or baroque flourishes. We might hate it - but in fact, the previous generation hating it might be the point.

160 points by ohjeez 3y ago

Designer News used to be an amazing community I used to visit almost as often as HN nowadays. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it. Dribbble is another such site that designers used to aggregate at, discuss, share interesting ideas and engage daily. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it.

kareemm 3y ago
How did things change after they were bought?
- samsolomon 3y ago
  I think most of the original community agrees that the combination of moving from invite only to open registration along with a lack of better moderation is where things started coming apart. And that’s not to blame the moderators. I think they did the best they could. But with the onslaught of spam, they needed more of them, more dedicated (paid) and better moderation tools. They got none of that though. You can see how that turned out in the screenshot on my site. That’s the front page with crypto spam.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

robertlagrant 3y ago

> The team viewed the move away from skeumorphism as a more honest approach to design. This is a nitpick in the grand scheme of this topic, but I wish this sort of language wouldn't enter the discussion. Most of what's discussed is fashion: skeuomophic/flat, neither is honest or dishonest. It's at such a high level of what they might term dishonesty that it's meaningless. Honest would be manipulating raw bits and everything else is dishonest? We don't need a moral reason to make a fashion change. "It's what other popular products are doing and we're following suit", or "we want to stand out so we're going with this" are perfectly fine. Everything else is imbued fluff.

Nevermark 3y ago
I also take issue with the idea that non-flat means skeuomorphism. That false dichotomy robbed interfaces of a lot bandwidth. Our visual system is designed to operate quickly, on a 2D field with 3D effects. The latter aid both our fovea and peripheral vision in quickly categorizing, grouping, distinguishing elements and their roles. They are a significant help even when we only use one eye and only see a pure 2D field. Careful use of color, shading that raises, lifts and sinks visual areas, textures, boundaries and other cues that demark coherent interface objects (is that editable text? a button? non-editable text?), smooth motion reflecting state changes, is not a misguided attempt to pull non-useful elements of our 3D world onto the screen. It is sensible design for the sense system that is being interfaced with. Similarly, making many user interface elements invisible until somehow discovered is not "simplifying".

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

Died long ago when their mod team banned people who actually used it.

dmalik 3y ago

I used to visit but stopped years ago. Just not enough content on the topic I think. My replacement has been sidebar which is nice because it a curated top 5 links a day. sidebar.io/

globalnode 3y ago

Kind of unrelated but this story sounds like the way I feel about most of the internet and TV nowadays. Its just bots and marketers talking to/past each other. Now I know there are quality sites out there (HN for one!) but they are very hard to find.

samsolomon 3y ago

Author here—some of you old-timers may remember when the LayerVault team launched Designer News here back in 2013—almost exactly 11 years ago. Sadly, yesterday it went offline. Thought I'd share for any of the designers or UI engineers here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091763

praisewhitey 3y ago
Interesting to see people were complaining about low quality comments from the beginning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093253
ianwalter 3y ago
Thanks for writing this. I don't remember why I stopped visiting DN a long time ago, but a reduction in quality content makes sense.
- edu 3y ago
  Agree, I used to visit it daily together with HN, but at some point it stopped having interesting kudos. To give it a positive spin, huge kudos to @dang for his amazing work at keeping HN great!

webwielder2 3y ago

Odd not to note that it was clearly created as the design equivalent of the engineering- centric HN. In general I found the discussions pretty shallow and anemic compared to HN, even during the supposed golden age.

Bjartr 3y ago

A shame, this is the first I've heard of it.

kvczor 3y ago

oh wow. I used to visit this page everyday and completely forgot about it until today.

karaterobot 3y ago

> If you’re a product designer or were a regular on Designer News, where do you have product discussions online? I’d love to find a replacement. Hoping to get an answer on this one myself.

bowsamic 3y ago
I'm not a designer but have gone through similar things in my own niches and honestly I just decided to stop talking about things. It wasn't really healthy or useful the way in which I was talking about those things anyway. I think it feels like we almost need to constantly discuss our ideas about our craft or hobbies to an audience, but I've really enjoyed letting go of that and just focussing on my own stuff.
dorian-graph 3y ago
It's not quite the same, but, https://read.cv/explore https://read.cv/explore is fun and interesting to see what people share.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  And they also have this https://posts.cv/ https://posts.cv/
vogt 3y ago
Can't believe I'm saying it but twitter has become the main spot for me. Read.cv as others have pointed out is also good. Way less signal and noise than X of course, but the content is almost always very high quality.
wilg 3y ago
Same, I don't have any regular places besides random blogs to learn about design stuff from people who really care. Any recommendations people have would be very welcome!
taitems 3y ago
"Design Twitter" is the only reason I haven't deleted my account yet. Yes, Twitter is full of toxicity and can easily become an echo chamber -- but if you actively set out to create one it can be a unique positive. Bear with me. I follow a range of designers and front enders from the early Dribbble days and basically haven't added many people since. Yes it might be "polite" to follow back friends and colleagues who follow you, but it disrupts the balance. I don't even follow my own parents back because it introduces a bunch of off-topic content.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Community is hard. And requires moderation. DN was a disaster of spam and grift and died much longer ago in actuality.

rchaud 3y ago
I created an account in 2018 and barely visited as the top links were always so spammy. Felt like Steemit or one of those unmoderated Reddit-like sites that look like a link dump for every growth marketer in the world.

droobles 3y ago

I started my career as a print designer and hung around designer news, helped me into my transition to digital and then ultimately as a developer!

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

I’m sad to read this. I enjoyed Designer News many years ago.

ehwhwhwhahhwh 3y ago
[flagged]

davidbarker 3y ago

I used to visit Designer News daily, and became one of the mods. It was fun for a while, and surprisingly took more effort than I expected — I felt quite a lot of pressure to make the right decision when it came to downranking stories, banning users, etc. Then, over time, it started to feel like the people higher up were less and less interested in the site, and no amount of moderation could fix some of the issues like the amount of spam. I had a brief moment a couple of years ago where I went back to the site, cleaned up the spam and low quality posts I could find in the top few pages in the hope that it might kick off some kind of resurrection. It didn't, mainly because hardly anyone except spammers were posting to the site at that point.

loceng 3y ago
It definitely seems like there needs to be a vested financial interest, where a larger and highly profitable organization like YCombinator and its portfolio of companies, are willing to fund operating costs. I feel for dang sometimes here on HN, it's far too much workload for a single individual - even with the crowdsourced mechanisms (which I don't think are designed well) to help facilitate his work managing the moderation of HN. I think YC could afford to drop more $ on forum moderation to improve efforts, however the organization seems fairly conservative in nature, and HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that, giving an overpowered weight to users to influence posts' and comment visibility who aren't necessary that critical in their thinking, are more reactive than responsive - and so I'm uncertain if or how many years it may take for the same concentration of higher quality conversations on the whole, relatively speaking from the past and now, to return.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that Which rule? Pointing out suspected shills or complaints about bad use of down- and upvotes? My understanding is that those rules are about specific complaints in the ongoing thread. Not a ban on discussing them in general?

alberth 3y ago

Any good alternatives today? E.g., what’s the “HN” for designers?

antidaily 3y ago
No. And Dribbble (now owned by same company as DN) sucks now too.
jacquesm 3y ago
HN. Splitting off a sliver of a community isn't necessarily viable, but that sliver is alive and well on HN and posts about design that are interesting tend to get upvoted, but not a whole lot of those posts are made. It takes effort and that's in part why reddit is so successful, there is enough traffic overall that niches can flourish that would never succeed as a stand-alone website. HN solves this problem by not having categories, which is another valid path. But to make a 'HN for designers' is DOA unless you are willing to put in a lot of time, effort and probably money to attract and retain an audience.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Yes, HN is moderated, meaning that design topics, however rare, do attract discussion. Unfortunately some of that discussion is of the "designers have too much power" variety, but you have to take the good in with the bad.
- davidivadavid 3y ago
  Pretty sure HN is one of the worst places to talk about design on the internet because its population seems oddly averse to the concept, tends to deride it as the useless whimsy of decoration-obsessed simpletons, and in general has nothing valuable to say about it except for its own obsessions with nostalgia-inspired tech aesthetics. It would be okay if it were just that, but coupled with the classic god-complex engineer attitude blaming every problem in the world on designers (you're a "manager"? take your number, you're next) it just makes for a very cringe experience for anyone who cares about design discourse.
- solarwindy 3y ago

sunjester 3y ago

Never heard of it.

rafark 3y ago
Me neither. But it seems like it’s another (at least formerly) independent site gone. It’s sad to see the modern web being dominated more and more by the big players (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, reddit, Amazon, etc). I’m not even old (I’m in my twenties) but I still remember reading lots of good independent blogs and forums not too long ago.
- personalityson 3y ago
  Thats why it died
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

taitems 3y ago

There's a name I haven't heard in a while! DN was fun for a very brief moment. But really, it died so long ago I think someone flat out forgot to tell it.

pmzy 3y ago

Like many of you, I haven’t visited DN in a long time. Though I liked it. This post gives me nostalgia. RIP DN

lastdong 3y ago

Totally missed Designer News, but getting a glimpse of what it was through the Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150618094329/https://www.designernews.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150618094329/https://www.desig... In a way, it does feel like HN as someone point out in another comment

fakecontent000 3y ago

[dead]

kristiandupont 3y ago

Like many others in here I had completely forgotten about DN. I don't think I stopped visiting it because of declining quality though, but rather that the concepts and principles of good design proliferated. A decade ago I still had this feeling that design was a secret world that I wanted to grasp but which felt out of reach somehow. Today, for better or worse, the essence of what we've learned is embedded within components, templates, frameworks, and examples, making the web predominantly aesthetic. It's more uniform which is boring, but I think the era of changing trends is more or less behind us. However, industry-specific differentiation persists—a fashion retailer's site diverges from a SaaS platform's landing page, yet each conforms to the norms of their niche.

noduerme 3y ago
> the era of changing trends is more or less behind us I find this statement very odd. Even if everything had somehow reached a state of near-perfection, the history of the web (and fashion, architecture, etc) seems to me to be an endless series of proofs that as soon as a period's worth of designers think that the arguments have been settled and all theories have been tested, some new trend (or a resurrected ancient monster) will come along and totally upend what's popular. I think this happens if only because young designers need to rebel. Ten years from now we might be living in a new era of glossy jelly buttons or steampunk or chrome or baroque flourishes. We might hate it - but in fact, the previous generation hating it might be the point.