Comment by tptacek
7 days ago
These pages look fine. I'm not seeing the problem. Most landing pages don't need to be creative statements; in fact, I'd wager the majority are hurt by creativity; real creativity is risky! Which of these applications want an artistic statement on their brochure pages?
>I'd wager the majority are hurt by creativity; real creativity is risky!
yes, and who wants creativity and risk when everything can look like the interior of a McDonalds. I'd much rather look at someone's terrible and scuffed attempt at designing their own page, because it at least signals that there is a human who isn't afraid to try something out rather than the Instagram filter version of a webpage.
There are times and places where I want to see a lot of humanity and imperfection in transactions, and there are times I don't. You're dunking using McDonalds as an example, but there's a reason they all look like that, and it's one of the most successful businesses in the world.
If you're building the application equivalent of JP Graziano or La Chaparrita Taqueria, make it human, scuffed up even. I'd like JP Graziano less if it looked like a Cheesecake Factory. Right there with you. But if you're building a tool, for developers, one that will mostly be used to conduct some kind of business? Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.
> Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.
but even that doesn't really hold any more. The great slopification has made it so that people don't even associate that kind of thing with reliability. Instead it's gotten a kind of ca the year 2000 "thing out of a Chinese factory" vibe to it. Even on practical grounds you might as well give it your own shot now because that stuff is poisoned.
As a concrete example, if you wanted to make a Github competitor ten years ago you tried to look like Github, now you're better off trying to look like sourcehut or codeberg because you don't look like the thing that dies every five minutes.
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Everyone says that but in aggregate they don't act like they believe it. Having "personality" means some people will love it and others will hate it, rather than everyone finding it acceptable and moving on to the actual content.
Brand differentiation, not art
Quick, pull up VictoriaMetrics.com and Honeycomb.io. Tell me how the design differentiates the brands. Sell me on the idea that anybody picks one over the other based on these web designs.
That’s not the point. The point is that when I visit a website that exactly matches XYZ pattern, and am encountering sites exactly like it multiple times every day, I’m left wondering whether the sites are trying to say something new and interesting. What ends up happening: the many slop variants have poisoned my opinion on all of them. I can instantly identify certain AI slop Claude designs, and I instantly remember the many flashy, yet buggy sites I’ve encountered.
The “vibe” of a product is absolutely important. Do logstash and datadog have similar vibes in their log viewers? Fuck no. I can instantly tell I’m using something related to that tool because of its design language. That helps it stay sticky. If you’re datadog, you don’t want users thinking the product feels and looks exactly like all the other log viewers. You want them to think it’s unique and the best or whatever. Marketing sites extend that, and are absolutely a component of the “vibes” you get from a product before doing a strict engineering breakdown.
Terrible examples - they're both ugly. The honeycomb one is particularly bad because it's covered up with a cookie popup on the left and the chat widget on the right.
Yes they both have the same overall structure as the Stripe landing page but if you can't tell the difference between the level of execution of those three, then you're just arguing for mediocrity.
Probably at the very least the one for artists and DJs, you don't think so? You'd rather take your car to the sweaty, unkempt mechanic with his hands coated in motor oil, who you've never seen without his overalls, or the clean mechanic who wears a nice business attire with the classy shoes and tie? I rest my case.
Artists and DJs are a separate category than what the original article is talking about, and I'd agree that there's more need for creativity in those cases (although I have definitely seen websites for people in more creative fields that have thrown usability and legibility out the window in pursuit of annoying "gee whiz" overly designed sites.
The mechanic is a separate argument - the article is talking about uniqueness of design and creativity, not cleanliness / orderliness. These sort of Tailwind designs are exceptionally clean and orderly, they're just predictable and not unique. To apply the article to your analogy, I wouldn't particularly care if my mechanic had the same coveralls that most mechanics wear as opposed to some unique design of coveralls.
I dunno, I know plenty of people that would make a case for first guy, y'know "A combat ready unit never passed inspection, and a inspection ready unit never passed combat" and all
I know plenty of DJ's that are surprisingly tech averse, whatever art is on their pages, is more of a testament to who they hired as a designer than their own artistic acumen
I think it would be extremely funny to have a DJ site that uses a Tailwind SAAS product template.