Ask HN: Who are the top UI designers on the web today?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=987363

by jayro • 17 years ago

64 86 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It would be interesting and useful to know who the top 5, 10 or even 20 designers are and what they've done that's so impressive, innovative, useful or loved.

vaksel• 17 years ago

probably Jason Putorti from Mint is on the list, so impressive, he got a designer in residence gig at Bessemer VC

benatkin• 17 years ago

Yeah, he's the one I'd mention. I like how Mint has their own widget in place of the <select> tag.

nwjsmith• 17 years ago

The work they do over at http://metalab.com/ is some of the best I've seen.

Edit: Oops! He's right, http://metalabdesign.com/

zaatar• 17 years ago

http://metalab.com/ is essentially blank; any links to work they've done?

qhoxie• 17 years ago

You probably mean http://www.metalabdesign.com

They are quite good.

jbr• 17 years ago

Similar look to hoptoadapp, which I've always been impressed by. Really clean "application-ey" look.

thechangelog• 17 years ago

It's certainly "consistent."

richcollins3• 17 years ago

"Designers are not highly paid cake decorators." -- Spencer Murrel

"When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance." -- PG

http://www.metalabdesign.com/about-us/ is full of "cake decoration". Other than that it is nice work.

dasil003• 17 years ago

Other than that it is nice work.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Sure, average people think design is purely decorative, but that does not mean that decoration is not a part of design.

What about their site do you find to be poorly designed?

mtrichardson2• 17 years ago

We have been incredibly impressed with the work Metalab has done for us - http://urbanairship.com/ and our admin interface at https://go.urbanairship.com/ . Couldn't recommend them highly enough.

Also, totally love Refresh Media - http://refreshmedia.com/ - they did http://bacn.com/ for us.

unalone5• 17 years ago

I visit Urban Airship and my first instinct is to hate how little padding there is between your iPhone image and the image right below it, which strikes me as overlarge.

cmelbye• 17 years ago

I like some of Metalab's work, but it seems like most of their designs are just copies of existing ones. http://go.urbanairship.com/ is almost identical to Metalab's marketing site except a few colors have been changed

unalone5• 17 years ago

The Metalab people were involved in a dispute with one of the Tumblr designers on IRC the one time I entered the Tumblr IRC, so I've got a bias that comes from that designer ranting at them for an underhanded design, but I find that I really dislike the Metalab style. It's too undiscriminatingly open, and it wastes a lot of space doing/saying simple things. I prefer people who're capable of packing a lot of information into a small space and keep it looking good.

dschobel• 17 years ago

Whoever designed the heroku site.

quickpost• 17 years ago

I agree 100%. That site is a work of art.

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

I would have to disagree, I think there a quite a few users like myself that find it difficult to look at light font on dark backgrounds for too long.

pjhyett• 17 years ago

http://twitter.com/seaofclouds is the man you're looking for. I worked with him at CNET for a while, great guy.

taitems• 17 years ago

I have found the vast majority of my favourites through twitter. And they're amazing for showing off WIPs and sharing freebies with you. One of the below (I can't remember who) disliked the Wave interface so much they re-mocked it themselves just for fun.

Jonas Rask - http://twitter.com/JonasRask

Jonathan Castro - http://twitter.com/DDrDark

MetaLab Design - http://twitter.com/metalab

Philipp Antoni - http://twitter.com/PhilippAntoni

richcollins3• 17 years ago

I think our designer (http://dekorte.com/) did an awesome job:

http://shop.stylous.com/

simplegeek• 17 years ago

Douglas Bowman(stopdesign.com) and Dan Cederholm(simplebits.com)--IMHO.

bkbleikamp2• 17 years ago

A couple that come to mind:

http://subtraction.com http://cubancouncil.com http://madebyelephant.com http://jasonsantamaria.com http://markboulton.co.uk http://hicksdesign.co.uk

furtivefelon• 17 years ago

Many designs on http://csszengarden.com/ is very nice, and it has designer contacts there as well.

alex_c• 17 years ago

Might not be exactly what you were asking, but I like Envato.

http://envato.com/

Particularly, I like their themes site:

http://themeforest.net/

jmulder2• 17 years ago

With all due respect to the aforementioned people, but personall I think the real rockstars are the leading designers behind sites like Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, BBC and digg's Daniel Burka. Designing for such a large audience while still keeping an eye on a company's goals and vision is what really is impressive. Making something look good is the easy part -- making it work flawlessly in an pre-existing environment with an incrediblyt large audience is the challenge.

irondavycole2• 17 years ago

A lot of my UI pals disagree, but I think the guys at Amazon and CNN are killing it, certainly operating at the highest level.

seldo• 17 years ago

CNN are great at cross-linking and surfacing content, and the latest update is furthering that goal. Amazon...? Not so sure. They succeed despite their fugly, confusing UI rather than because of it.

chunkyslink6• 17 years ago

I think Amazon is an awful UI. I'm not saying I could do any better, but for me, I hate it.

brm• 17 years ago

Huge Inc. did the CNN redesign

tor• 17 years ago

30 top web designers on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tor/status/6525201103

kingkilr• 17 years ago

I'm a big fan of Nathan Borror's stuff: http://nathanborror.com/

Also Wilson Miner: http://www.wilsonminer.com/work/

And Greg Newman: http://carbon8.us/

Keep in mind that I don't know many designers, so I've pretty much just listed all the ones I know.

ars• 17 years ago

Top designers, or most famous designers? It's not the same.

davidw• 17 years ago

Is there a way to measure it, other than subjective tastes?

thinklime• 17 years ago

How has no one mentioned Nick La?

http://www.ndesign-studio.com/

Also, Dragon Interactive is pretty cool, although they can be mega douches at times.

http://dragoninteractive.com/

callmeed• 17 years ago

I've always been a fan of MetaLab's work

I also really like what Sofa does: http://www.madebysofa.com/ (checkout the enstore demo, epic: http://www.enstore.com)

Ryan Singer of 37signals was very impressive when I saw him speak at RailsConf this year. I definitely think he's up there. http://twitter.com/rjs

lordmatty• 17 years ago

http://www.thenobleunion.com - we work with them often. Excellent iPhone and web design. Think they are reworking their site.

teej• 17 years ago

Haven't seen the Sofa guys on here yet. Minimalist, Apple-esque app design: http://www.madebysofa.com/

My favorite interactive design agency: http://www.2advanced.com/

arnorhs2• 17 years ago

I wouldn't consider 2advanced to be a company that's good at UI... They're good at flash, I guess

dzuc• 17 years ago

STANDBY: INITIALIZING: DIGITAL ATMOSPHERE

...really?

elviejo• 17 years ago

I can't believe no one has mentioned: Jon Tan His taste is exquisite his websites are beautiful and functional.

http://jontangerine.com/

petercooper• 17 years ago

I don't know if we're talking "top 10 in the world" but I want to recommend Amy Hoy - our own user ahoyhere - http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ahoyhere - http://slash7.com/about/

Jim_Neath• 17 years ago

Not sure about top 10 but I really like Kyle Neath who now works at Github

steerpike• 17 years ago

You're asking about UI designers and most people have provided links to Designers - two different beasts in my view.

I think stackoverflow if one of the best examples of brilliant UI I've seen recently - certainly one of the best I've seen on the web - but it probably wouldn't make my top list for beautiful design.

petervandijck6• 17 years ago

StackOverflow is, from a UX perspective, indeed very well done.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

You're asking about UI designers and most people have provided links to Designers

This is the crucial point in this whole discussion. If the user has a task to accomplish, the user may indeed want the task to be accomplished in a beautiful environment, but most of all the user wants the task to get done. User interface design is first of all tested by seeing whether or not any typical user anticipated for the site or for the application can accomplish the task successfully.

jot• 17 years ago

Clearleft http://clearleft.com

Stuff they've done:

http://silverbackapp.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

http://www.tourdust.com/

http://www.scifi.co.uk/

http://clearleft.com/made/wwf/

http://clearleft.com/made/ratemyarea/

richardburton• 17 years ago

How about Ryan Singer at 37signals? Not only is he a great, functional designer but I think he's an awesome teacher, too.

http://37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns//index

unalone5• 17 years ago

My personal opinion is that he's very good, but not great. His designs work very well, but he never strikes me as ambitious or risk-taking in his work, which I feel is a must for great.

numair• 17 years ago

Aaron Sittig - http://www.facebook.com

petervandijck6• 17 years ago

Facebook is awesome user experience. The visual design is pretty decent, but it's the UX that's awesome.

yannis• 17 years ago

IMHO Top UI design http://thesixtyone.com, anyone knows the designer?

chunkyslink6• 17 years ago

Its impossible to accurately classify something subjective into a top X list. The lists will always be skewed into the tastes of the judges or list compiler.

Take music charts for example. The top 20 could be renamed, the '20 records that teenagers like at the moment'.

That said I would like to say that UI designers that work for one company who have one product, do not deserve the same amount of kudos as really skilled agency UI designers who work on upwards of 10 UI's a year. They solve 10 times more problems than those who work on one product.

petervandijck6• 17 years ago

Disagreed. I find that the agencies don't tend to "solve" problems, because they're not there when their solutions are measured/exposed to the real world. Agencies tend to take a stab at solutions. In house designers need to solve things.

chunkyslink6• 17 years ago

Perhaps that is the case when the relationship is not right. In a lot of cases we run the sites for our clients and dont have to ask them to make UI changes. We spend a lot of time fine tuning and getting this part right. We do this on a permanent basis.

But I accept your point if this kind of relationship doesnt exist and the site is 'handed over'

huffer3• 17 years ago

surely off-topic and probably silly, but I was wondering where do all the designers get the pictures they use? is there a market going on for such thing? (I assume they won't shoot the photos themselves -- division of labor and all :D)

petervandijck6• 17 years ago

It's called stock photography :)

huffer3• 17 years ago

I stand educated.

I inferred such thing must exist, but I never encountered it in the real world during my tribulations so far :)

thank you.

chunkyslink6• 17 years ago

One such site is http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php

huffer3• 17 years ago

thank you very much!

could this stand as a sub-topic for top photo shops, branching the 'top UI designers' main theme? (yes, I'm trying realy hard to subvert this topic :p)

unalone5• 17 years ago

Let me cast my vote for Shaun Inman, whose two web apps are brilliantly designed and brilliantly functional. His homepage is pretty dandy, too: http://shauninman.com

lexx12• 17 years ago

My pick: - Ryan Singer of 37signals - HappyCog - ClearLeft - Unit Interactive - Made by Sofa

Also, I think UI design is different from Visual design. I found that some of the posts below are referring to visual specialists only.

mcrittenden• 17 years ago

As much as I really don't like the guy, I think Mark Boulton would be up there. His UX work for Drupal (some of which is at http://d7ux.org) is really top knotch.

GBKS• 17 years ago

What do you think of Fantasy Interactive (http://www.f-i.com)? Not trying to self-promote, just want to see what people think. We've done some big portals like http://ea.com, http://events.nationalgeographic.com/events, and http://atari.com, but also more experience-focused sites like http://panamera.com

I'm a big fan of the HappyCog crew, Information Architects, and Huge, to limit it to three.

dem0o83• 17 years ago

Big fan of F-I work... I like http://www.kontain.com/ especially

ubuwaits• 17 years ago

Naz Hamid has done some wonderful work. I particularly like the work he did here on a CMS project: http://weightshift.com/design/aiga-cms-design

I also think the work skinnyCorp does (http://www.skinnycorp.com/) on all their sites is fantastic.

mikecuesta• 17 years ago

I don't think it comes down solely to the designer, instead think of the company and team of professionals who make a great UI possible. A great UI design trapped inside of a photoshop file is useless. It takes the effort of multiple people to make it happen - I think a better question to ask is what companies are creating the best UI's that are actually being used today.

pantalones2• 17 years ago

agreed completely.

earle• 17 years ago

Nobody has mentioned Khoi Vinh? Creative Director from the New York Times?

bkbleikamp2• 17 years ago

I mentioned him :) His personal site in subtraction.com

pantalones2• 17 years ago

i think the names of the top 5, 10, or 20 designers aren't public because they are busy working on uis instead of promoting themselves on the web. it's all a matter of opinion. a lot of the people mentioned below have 1-2 things under their belt, excepting some of the more seasoned folks like bowman, vinh, and miner. the reality is no one person is responsible for a great ui. it's a confluence of talent. the only reason you know about any of these products is because the talent of multiple individuals produced it.

jamesk2• 17 years ago

One designer not mentioned on this list is Jason Fried of 37 Signals. Basecamp is very useful. Web App designers don't get the attention of flashy visual designers but after repeated usage of an application, you really get a sense of how well thought out it is.

dem0o83• 17 years ago

Timothy Gray of http://www.shelfari.com/ Great UI and UX design.

dem0o83• 17 years ago

Few more apps that I consider great UI/UX design implementation... http://www.foodspotting.com/, http://hunch.com/

Ask HN: Who are the top UI designers on the web today?

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