HN user

tomcreighton

346 karma

I design things.

Posts28
Comments57
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researchers.io 11y ago

Researchers.io – Hacker News for UX/Customer Research

tomcreighton
9pts1
heistmade.com 11y ago

Designing the Smart Bank

tomcreighton
9pts0
medium.com 12y ago

A Different Animal

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2pts0
tomcreighton.com 13y ago

Glider - A minimal, text-focused theme for Wordpress

tomcreighton
85pts30
tomcreighton.com 13y ago

Relatable Spaces

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1pts0
tomcreighton.com 13y ago

Chipping Away

tomcreighton
1pts0
tomcreighton.com 13y ago

Getting Something Off my (Tool)chest

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4pts2
tomcreighton.com 13y ago

Learn to be Fast, not Good

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2pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Understanding the Whys

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1pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Salary Expectations

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8pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Less BA, more MBA

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2pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Cloning the iOS Ecosystem

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3pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

The Personal API

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3pts2
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

The Time I Didn't Get Hired by Facebook

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2pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Hiring - Must be godlike to apply

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34pts23
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

How I Made $1000 Without Really Trying

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9pts6
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Take Out (the core concept)

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2pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Empty Storefronts

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3pts2
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Android: Antenna-headed Stepchild

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2pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Voice Activated

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3pts1
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Tweetie-style retweets in Twitter.app

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2pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

The ROI of Ignorance

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1pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

The Internet is my Resume

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35pts34
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Git for Designers

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1pts0
tomcreighton.com 14y ago

Building Tipogram - how to make a DIY digital goods business.

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2pts0
www.factore.ca 15y ago

Turn Wordpress into an Image-Slinging Warhorse in Three Steps

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8pts2
www.factore.ca 16y ago

Information Architecture in Two Really Easy Steps

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9pts3
www.factore.ca 16y ago

Thinking about the Process - with Videogames

tomcreighton
5pts0

Thirded! If anyone knows what it takes to get things off the ground, it's Mr. McDowall. He's assembled a pretty interesting cross-section of the startup crowd here - keenly looking forward to reading this myself.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that they're wrong. If I was, I could have easily said "If you use Fireworks, you're a bad person." I don't care what tools you use.

What I'd like to see less of is the obsessive fascination with our tools - it's great to be using cool stuff, but that's a means to an end, not the end in and of itself.

The Personal API 14 years ago

I think the rise of the internet and the way do business thereon - fairly transparently, and socially - has made us more aware of how 'legacy' companies are behaving. Our expectations of how businesses should work has changed.

He's not slamming the entire service, he's slamming the redesign, and rightly so. The entire purpose of the site is to teach - and the changes to the design have obfuscated what course you're supposed to take next. The design is objectively not working as well as it could.

How Design Works 14 years ago

While I agree Dribbble's limited canvas doesn't really help to find 'designers' as you're defining them, to thus write off everyone on there as 'artists' seems a bit short-sighted.

I would argue that amazing UX _IS_ amazing marketing, precisely because people want to tell other people how awesome the UX is. I have a handy example: the meteoric launch of Clear.

The subtext of this headline seems to be "Why does Facebook have a secret paper fetish?" rather than "How awesome is it that Facebook has a secret paper fetish?"

Personally, I'd be far more motivated by a fantastic screen-printed poster than an 'internal memo'.

The two examples here are basically the same - a position so top-heavy with requirements and areas of expertise that they'll both be equally difficult to fill.

The fact that it's a design position in this case is not the problem - I would have railed just as hard against an overloaded dev position.

True enough. The 'build it once, sell it forever' aspect is pretty compelling - but you do need that up-front effort. Unfortunately I haven't been able to muster the extra time since then to make something new.

To everybody in this thread: I absolutely should have marketed the hell out of this thing. What was interesting to me was the uptake without putting in that effort. I agreed whole-heartedly that I would have had much better results if I had actually done things 'properly'.

What is with the developer antipathy towards Wordpress? It might be ugly spaghetti code but it's fast, it works, and the plugin ecosystem means you can get pretty much any functionality under the sun for free.

The author could have had a working solution up and running in 5 minutes. I don't get it.

Can we put the "design = looks pretty" chestnut to bed already?

Thinking a technical co-founder is going to bring the same skillset as a design co-founder, plus coding, is unrealistic as best.

Does 'Golden Age' imply that it's at a peak right now? I think this will only accelerate. Design-focus is as much of a competitive advantage as having a star-hot technical team.

I'd like it if the companies asked to do this just pulled out of the country altogether. "Can't deal with the fundamental nature of the internet? No internet, then." It's needlessly vindictive on my part, but we've seen this story play out again and again. That's not how it works!

I'm much happier working where my incentives to make great stuff are aligned with that of the end user. Trying to do a end-run around ludicrous middleman requests never turns out well.

Most job/hiring advice and anecdotes on HN seem to be very adversarial. Obviously this makes for a better story, but why aren't we seeing more posts about preventing this sort of employee-employer breakdown - i.e. "Don't Work for Assholes".

Secondly, I'd be happy if my stock options amounted to more than the cost of a couple rounds of drinks. Expecting to receive high value from something so nebulous seems presumptuous.

Well, kudos for being devoted to his business(es), but how much is he bringing to the table during each of those 8-hour periods?

If I was working 16-hour days every day, I'm almost certain I'd be less productive than if I was working 'normal' or even reduced-hour days.

Maybe he's just _that_ energetic, but my ability to get meaningful work done is not an endless fount. Downtime is important.

I'd be thrilled if that happened. They've made some decent first strides towards integration lately, but things are still very siloed.

Swearing 15 years ago

The thing is, I agree with you - adding swear words isn't a panacea to make your talk instantly more engaging. Far from it! But neither do I think it's a lazy way out.

I'd be really surprised if any of my professional peers were offended if I were giving a talk and dropped in a swear word or two ... and I'd rather do so, and get a good reaction from a smaller percentage than water down my enthusiasm and reach nobody strongly.

Swearing 15 years ago

I'd honestly like to know too.

In my _professional_ life, I am not aware of anyone who would bat an eyelash at swearing in a professional presentation. Indeed, some of the best panels I've attended at well-known conferences have been pretty rough, language-wise. But they were, indeed, great panels!

It seems like about half of the commenters here are having trouble parsing the relationship between content and delivery.

Swearing 15 years ago

"I’m content with losing a handful of people if that means I connect much stronger with everyone else." - definitely the main takeaway from this. I'd rather have half my audience write me off for swearing than have the entire audience not care about what I had to say.

I'm surprised by this too, but as I recall the same thing happened when a bunch of sites were discovered to have the Konami code. Leveraging nerd nostalgia = big return.