6 ms·

Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

67 points by joshuasortino 12y ago

ing33k 12y ago
"Engineers should teach engineers GIT, designers should teach designers GIT." is git part of modern design workflow ? how are designers using git ?
- Pacabel 12y ago
  All sorts of assets have been stored in version control systems for decades now. That includes designs, images, documents, specifications, and so forth.
- anton_gogolev 12y ago
  Clone the repository and start a webapp locally to tweak CSS and do other designery things.
- aidos 12y ago
  At any scale, git is probably not going to be your best bet. svn might actually be a better option as it allows you to checkout just the parts of the repository that you need. More crucially, it doesn't keep the entire history locally (just working copy and a the latest(ish) version in the repository). This really starts to matter when you have 200mb PSDs. There are probably even better options out there (though previous searches didn't reveal anything I particularly got on with) - there are certainly better options than git. Ideally something based around the dropbox model (doing block level deduplication) would be wonderful. Maybe such a product exists?
  - sfall 12y ago
    git does allow you to check out only a selection of version history
    - aidos 12y ago
      Oh ok, but that's not how it would operate, right? So, say it was just me working on a project using a psd. If I committed it a couple of times a day, I'd end up with all the old copies in the local object store. Maybe it's possible to clear those out, somehow? Either way, you'll find that you have to jump through hoops to get reasonable behaviour with git in this use case. I see I've been downvoted for my previous comment. I'd appreciate a justification from the downvoter as this is actually an area in which I have some experience.
- joshuasortino 12y ago
  I was talking about the 10% of the time designers should be coding in this type of environment. (I.e. pushing polish code or hacking together a quick marketing page.)
aleem 12y ago
If you are writing for a design audience, you are going to get a lot of frowns for the 700KB paper background image you have on your blog (and the paper barely even shows).
- hnha 12y ago
  much worse (dark pattern?): on my mobile it puts a Twitter share link exactly where my thumb is touching the screen for scrolling.
rys 12y ago
The thing that stood out for me is that over a billion unique people use the service. Does it really underpin that much of the modern Internet?
- Pacabel 12y ago
  How many of those are voluntary, active users, though? I see them more as "victims" of it, who are subjected to it without giving much consent at all. Somebody loads a blog article or some other web page that uses Disqus for accepting and showing comments, and without necessarily wanting to use it the page's visitors have become "users" of Disqus.
  - rplnt 12y ago
    It's similar (though a bit stretched) to count site visitors as google analytics users. Or, less stretched, users who click on ads as a Google Adsense/words users. It doesn't subtract from their success though.
  - netcan 12y ago
    sheesh. That's a bit much. The site owner chooses a commenting system. People who want to comment, comment using it. Victims?!
    - aidos 12y ago
      Victims is a pretty loaded term, but it's not an unreasonable accusation. The number of unique monthly users of disqus shouldn't be based on those who unwittingly use it. Reading your comment again, I wonder what the true definition is. Is the number based on page views? Or is it the number of people who actively interact with the widget (say, posting a comment) after it has loaded? Sounds like you're assuming the later metric while the 'victims' comment is assuming the former. Edit: thinking about it, 1 billion unique people, that sounds like the victim class to me.
    - southflorida 12y ago
      yep, speak my peace or not, have no voice or use their crap system. victim is about right imho.
porker 12y ago
Would you say #6 and #7 are true generally, or Joshua's opinion? To avoid inefficiency I find having people 'jigsaw-puzzle-piece' shaped helps - it means they're not always waiting on Bob on the desk over there to do the task that's blocking them (even if that task is only "Export an item from a PSD").
- scrollaway 12y ago
  #6 is just semantics. Multi-purpose people are great. Rare and exceptional people are great. Designers who can code are great. What does it matter what you call them?
DigitalSea 12y ago
I agree with pretty much everything, except designers using Git. Sadly, Git doesn't work for PSD files properly. Some of the PSD files I've worked with before (900mb+) for larger websites and applications would definitely not be a good fit for Git. Although I think the blame lies mostly on Photoshop's end not being the right tool for web design, but being used by designers anyway. I think whatever tool ends up replacing Photoshop as the de-facto standard (if it happens) should ideally have a visual re-visioning system built in a la Adobe Creative Cloud. We aren't quite at that point where designers are saving out all of the assets for you, then that would be different. You can source control individual assets, but not a large PSD file properly. I've begun to train the designers at my work to save out assets for pretty much everything leaving me to solve the engineering problems like how everything is going to work and less time cutting out images from a PSD file, but we aren't quite there yet where this is a universal thing that designers just know and willing do. Some people might disagree with point #6, but I wholeheartedly agree as someone who works for a company where designers design and developers develop. I think to be truly great at design, you need to devote at least 90% of your time (minimum) to bettering your design skills. If you're a developer, the opposite rings true. I think it is important for design/dev to have a mutual understanding of one another, but I don't think you can truly be a great designer and great developer in one. Having an understanding of the other perspective is important. You'll never meet a surgeon who specialises in brain and heart surgery, why should design and development be any different? Fortunately, the employer I work for doesn't compartmentalise the teams from one another. There is nothing more horrible than working in a place where design and development teams are on separate sides of the office or even different floors with the only communicative layer being a project manager or team leaders. Designers and developers sit down and tackle problems together and educate one another in the process. This is something that happens through the whole process from wire-framing to prototyping to final build. I think designers and developers should work together at every step. I have met talented design/developers, but great ones of both fields are extremely rare. PS. Joshua, if you're reading this comment, you might want to reconsider the 670kb background image on your site. I loaded your blog on my slow ADSL connection and it was painful.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  I'm not a designer, so please enlighten me. What kind of data can be held in a single image for a PSD to be 900 megabytes? Is it a single PSD for hundreds of web pages or?
greggman 12y ago
> Designers are generally right brained and engineers are usually left brained Is that true? Even if it's a myth of left vs right side of the brain are designers and engineers really that different in the brain?
- mercer 12y ago
  In my experience working with designers, and having done a decent amount of design-y work: yes, definitely. In my experience, designers tend to be more holistic in their view on things, to a point where they might outright hate it when things are picked apart and defined and categorized. Which is exactly what engineers excel at. I also find designers to generally be more... emotional, or at least they show their emotional side more, or allow it to express itself. And then there's the strong value they place on the 'design' of things. The feeling, the cohesion, etc. One of the best examples of the difference I can think of is when I showed worrydream.com to a designer friend. I was excited about Brett Victor's talks, his views on programming and interfaces and whatnot, and figured my friend would be at least interested in the UX stuff. This friend, however, hated how the site felt bloated and slow and how that in itself was pretty much enough for him to not take this guy's articles seriously. It was an affront, and surely anyone who had anything interesting to say on design and UI would take care of his own site! Now in many cases the difference between designers and engineers might not be so pronounced. I suppose it's a spectrum. But I notice very clear differences between developers and designers, and it seems to be a common cause of conflict. I've also noticed this difference within myself. For the past two years I mostly focused on development, after a long time of taking care of more of the whole pipeline (especially client contact and the 'social' aspects of design). I noticed that I started caring markedly less and less about the end result's 'beauty' or logic, and more and more on the internals. I actually stopped noticing things that would've bothered me tremendously in the past: fonts, padding, margins, UX, and so on. In part, maybe it's also a role you step into (where either role somehow excludes the other). And the mere fact that I come across very few people who seem to be both excellent designers and engineers supports the idea that there's a difference.
- blankenship 12y ago
  I’m a systems-minded designer who can code. Left/right-brained signifiers work decently well in theory, but fall apart with real humans. People aren’t that binary.
j_s 12y ago
Does anyone have any thoughts on Disqus, particularly reviewing the usability and/or design aspects? I see the service itself as meeting a need for those with static sites or who otherwise don't want to deal with managing their own commenting system. Disqus has also made some business decisions to increase revenue that have upset a few HN'ers¹. I haven't heard any complaints about usability or other design issues, though. ¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220072
- joshuasortino 12y ago
  Even if you haven't heard them, we still get complaints about the usability of the product! It's what we did with the feedback that matters. As for the business decisions, those were decided by VPs and the business development team.
hannesfostie 12y ago
Isn't there something to be said about engineers teaching designers git, and the other way around? I understand that what you're saying is easier and more efficient, but learning to communicate should be a pretty big deal, and teaching others helps a lot.

67 points by joshuasortino 12y ago

"Engineers should teach engineers GIT, designers should teach designers GIT." is git part of modern design workflow ? how are designers using git ?

Pacabel 12y ago
All sorts of assets have been stored in version control systems for decades now. That includes designs, images, documents, specifications, and so forth.
anton_gogolev 12y ago
Clone the repository and start a webapp locally to tweak CSS and do other designery things.
aidos 12y ago
At any scale, git is probably not going to be your best bet. svn might actually be a better option as it allows you to checkout just the parts of the repository that you need. More crucially, it doesn't keep the entire history locally (just working copy and a the latest(ish) version in the repository). This really starts to matter when you have 200mb PSDs. There are probably even better options out there (though previous searches didn't reveal anything I particularly got on with) - there are certainly better options than git. Ideally something based around the dropbox model (doing block level deduplication) would be wonderful. Maybe such a product exists?
- sfall 12y ago
  git does allow you to check out only a selection of version history
  - aidos 12y ago
    Oh ok, but that's not how it would operate, right? So, say it was just me working on a project using a psd. If I committed it a couple of times a day, I'd end up with all the old copies in the local object store. Maybe it's possible to clear those out, somehow? Either way, you'll find that you have to jump through hoops to get reasonable behaviour with git in this use case. I see I've been downvoted for my previous comment. I'd appreciate a justification from the downvoter as this is actually an area in which I have some experience.
joshuasortino 12y ago
I was talking about the 10% of the time designers should be coding in this type of environment. (I.e. pushing polish code or hacking together a quick marketing page.)

aleem 12y ago

If you are writing for a design audience, you are going to get a lot of frowns for the 700KB paper background image you have on your blog (and the paper barely even shows).

hnha 12y ago
much worse (dark pattern?): on my mobile it puts a Twitter share link exactly where my thumb is touching the screen for scrolling.

rys 12y ago

The thing that stood out for me is that over a billion unique people use the service. Does it really underpin that much of the modern Internet?

Pacabel 12y ago
How many of those are voluntary, active users, though? I see them more as "victims" of it, who are subjected to it without giving much consent at all. Somebody loads a blog article or some other web page that uses Disqus for accepting and showing comments, and without necessarily wanting to use it the page's visitors have become "users" of Disqus.
- rplnt 12y ago
  It's similar (though a bit stretched) to count site visitors as google analytics users. Or, less stretched, users who click on ads as a Google Adsense/words users. It doesn't subtract from their success though.
- netcan 12y ago
  sheesh. That's a bit much. The site owner chooses a commenting system. People who want to comment, comment using it. Victims?!
  - aidos 12y ago
    Victims is a pretty loaded term, but it's not an unreasonable accusation. The number of unique monthly users of disqus shouldn't be based on those who unwittingly use it. Reading your comment again, I wonder what the true definition is. Is the number based on page views? Or is it the number of people who actively interact with the widget (say, posting a comment) after it has loaded? Sounds like you're assuming the later metric while the 'victims' comment is assuming the former. Edit: thinking about it, 1 billion unique people, that sounds like the victim class to me.
  - southflorida 12y ago
    yep, speak my peace or not, have no voice or use their crap system. victim is about right imho.

porker 12y ago

Would you say #6 and #7 are true generally, or Joshua's opinion? To avoid inefficiency I find having people 'jigsaw-puzzle-piece' shaped helps - it means they're not always waiting on Bob on the desk over there to do the task that's blocking them (even if that task is only "Export an item from a PSD").

scrollaway 12y ago
#6 is just semantics. Multi-purpose people are great. Rare and exceptional people are great. Designers who can code are great. What does it matter what you call them?

DigitalSea 12y ago

I agree with pretty much everything, except designers using Git. Sadly, Git doesn't work for PSD files properly. Some of the PSD files I've worked with before (900mb+) for larger websites and applications would definitely not be a good fit for Git. Although I think the blame lies mostly on Photoshop's end not being the right tool for web design, but being used by designers anyway. I think whatever tool ends up replacing Photoshop as the de-facto standard (if it happens) should ideally have a visual re-visioning system built in a la Adobe Creative Cloud. We aren't quite at that point where designers are saving out all of the assets for you, then that would be different. You can source control individual assets, but not a large PSD file properly. I've begun to train the designers at my work to save out assets for pretty much everything leaving me to solve the engineering problems like how everything is going to work and less time cutting out images from a PSD file, but we aren't quite there yet where this is a universal thing that designers just know and willing do. Some people might disagree with point #6, but I wholeheartedly agree as someone who works for a company where designers design and developers develop. I think to be truly great at design, you need to devote at least 90% of your time (minimum) to bettering your design skills. If you're a developer, the opposite rings true. I think it is important for design/dev to have a mutual understanding of one another, but I don't think you can truly be a great designer and great developer in one. Having an understanding of the other perspective is important. You'll never meet a surgeon who specialises in brain and heart surgery, why should design and development be any different? Fortunately, the employer I work for doesn't compartmentalise the teams from one another. There is nothing more horrible than working in a place where design and development teams are on separate sides of the office or even different floors with the only communicative layer being a project manager or team leaders. Designers and developers sit down and tackle problems together and educate one another in the process. This is something that happens through the whole process from wire-framing to prototyping to final build. I think designers and developers should work together at every step. I have met talented design/developers, but great ones of both fields are extremely rare. PS. Joshua, if you're reading this comment, you might want to reconsider the 670kb background image on your site. I loaded your blog on my slow ADSL connection and it was painful.

scrollaway 12y ago
I'm not a designer, so please enlighten me. What kind of data can be held in a single image for a PSD to be 900 megabytes? Is it a single PSD for hundreds of web pages or?

greggman 12y ago

> Designers are generally right brained and engineers are usually left brained Is that true? Even if it's a myth of left vs right side of the brain are designers and engineers really that different in the brain?

mercer 12y ago
In my experience working with designers, and having done a decent amount of design-y work: yes, definitely. In my experience, designers tend to be more holistic in their view on things, to a point where they might outright hate it when things are picked apart and defined and categorized. Which is exactly what engineers excel at. I also find designers to generally be more... emotional, or at least they show their emotional side more, or allow it to express itself. And then there's the strong value they place on the 'design' of things. The feeling, the cohesion, etc. One of the best examples of the difference I can think of is when I showed worrydream.com to a designer friend. I was excited about Brett Victor's talks, his views on programming and interfaces and whatnot, and figured my friend would be at least interested in the UX stuff. This friend, however, hated how the site felt bloated and slow and how that in itself was pretty much enough for him to not take this guy's articles seriously. It was an affront, and surely anyone who had anything interesting to say on design and UI would take care of his own site! Now in many cases the difference between designers and engineers might not be so pronounced. I suppose it's a spectrum. But I notice very clear differences between developers and designers, and it seems to be a common cause of conflict. I've also noticed this difference within myself. For the past two years I mostly focused on development, after a long time of taking care of more of the whole pipeline (especially client contact and the 'social' aspects of design). I noticed that I started caring markedly less and less about the end result's 'beauty' or logic, and more and more on the internals. I actually stopped noticing things that would've bothered me tremendously in the past: fonts, padding, margins, UX, and so on. In part, maybe it's also a role you step into (where either role somehow excludes the other). And the mere fact that I come across very few people who seem to be both excellent designers and engineers supports the idea that there's a difference.
blankenship 12y ago
I’m a systems-minded designer who can code. Left/right-brained signifiers work decently well in theory, but fall apart with real humans. People aren’t that binary.

j_s 12y ago

Does anyone have any thoughts on Disqus, particularly reviewing the usability and/or design aspects? I see the service itself as meeting a need for those with static sites or who otherwise don't want to deal with managing their own commenting system. Disqus has also made some business decisions to increase revenue that have upset a few HN'ers¹. I haven't heard any complaints about usability or other design issues, though. ¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220072

joshuasortino 12y ago
Even if you haven't heard them, we still get complaints about the usability of the product! It's what we did with the feedback that matters. As for the business decisions, those were decided by VPs and the business development team.

hannesfostie 12y ago

Isn't there something to be said about engineers teaching designers git, and the other way around? I understand that what you're saying is easier and more efficient, but learning to communicate should be a pretty big deal, and teaching others helps a lot.