Thanks for the step-by-step, but I think you should mention in the blog post that you're including a referral link. At least @irq is transparent about it.
For someone very vocal and direct about one specific designer's work, there seems to be a very obvious lack of work, a portfolio or a link to a Dribbble profile on his own site.
As a designer myself, I'm always down for critiques and feedback (especially when it's a tough pill to swallow — this is what keeps me improving), but Michal, your post was overly critical and not constructive in any way. You mentioned your youth and ambition — being a designer is all about communication, whether in creating a product for your users, in pitching clients, in explaining functionality to an engineer, etc., and in my opinion, this is not the way to communicate with someone regarding their work, designer or not. Best of luck in learning this.
Edit: here's an example of someone doing something similar in the right way: http://kyrobeshay.com.
Yes, do ask them to design something if that helps you, but make sure you're having him/her design something on the fly that's related to your product, not a real problem you're actually having currently. When interviewing for my summer position at Milk, a part of the application process was re-designing a product that was similar to what Oink could eventually be. The exercise is supposed to be theoretical anyway, so this just furthers the amount of time a designer has to think about the problems and to just get to the solution. This could also be a take-home assignment where they allocate Xhrs to the problem.
More than anything, recognize that the purpose of this exercise isn't to see the designer's abilities (you should be able to see this in their portfolio of previous work), but more about how they approach problems and how they think critically. Understand that no one can ever really outline their design process specifically, but should be able to speak to about the way they solved problems in the past (again, see portfolio) and how they came to solutions.
Talk to them about what they view as "good design" and why they think it. A good designer is ultimately a good communicator and should be able to talk you through why they think it's "good" (in their opinion).
Something that might provide insight is this Behance interview of Ben Barry, Facebook's communication designer: http://the99percent.com/articles/7118/Facebooks-Ben-Barry-On.... It's not completely specific, but it will give you insight into the way most designers (in Silicon Valley, at least) think about their jobs and their work.
In the company I co-founded, for the longest time the business cards of me and my three co-founders said just that: "Co-founder." Once we were to a good place and were profitable (and the REAL work started), action items began to fall by the wayside, despite the proficiencies we all knew we had (you've heard the phrase "if everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible").
Internally—not to anyone else—we designated CEO, CTO, CMO and COO designations. It wasn't about titles, it was about a mindset; that's when things started getting done again. It wasn't about ego at all. It wasn't about getting off from having a title on my business card (in fact, we didn't re-print new cards because we didn't want to spend money on new cards, hah!).
Our decision was about highlighting our proficiencies and giving each other the power to take ownership of different aspects of the business we owned together. We could give a shit if people were impressed with a title on a piece of paper.
My mentor, who's a wildly successful and brilliant entrepreneur and about twice my age said this to me today: your 20s are like Puberty 2.0. We had a two hour conversation and he's seen the same thing in his nephews and his students and former students (he was a b-school prof for a while before retiring).
My biggest problem seems trying to find what excites and motivates me and not feeling apathetic about all this web shit. I'm workin' on it.
Looks like there was some back-and-forth with claims of a misleading title in the comments on the article. Rather than try and keep up with what was changed and when, I dropped all interest with what the author had to say due to their shoddy writing style.
It's up to interpretation whether or not the title is "misleading," but one thing is for certain—it's definitely sensationalist.
To me, stock photography/illustrations have nothing to do with "crowdsourcing," (e.g.: 99designs, LogoTournament).
We're working this out as we speak! Make sure to keep up with the blog as we're posting info everyday as it becomes available on conjunctured.com. We're looking to be open in some capacity by the beginning of the month.
If you're going to innovationCamp on the 28th, we're a sponsor and will be around AND we're hosting the official after party, so make sure you attend both so you can ask us questions and come check out the space in person.
Send me an email or a tweet for more info! @cesart // [email protected]
Agree with timcederman. Pre-Google buyout, there were and still are tons of video hosting/sharing startups. BUT, why did YouTube ultimately take off and get purchased by Google? They did something different/better than everyone else.
In YouTube's case, I argue that they knew how to market themselves. Don't discredit your positioning and target audience. Write a kickass app tailored to what they specifically need. And hey, if it's another video app, how is your version better or more niche than YouTube?
Just to be clear, I'm one of the co-founders of Conjunctured.
What we're trying to do is eventually get to a YC model or something fairly similar; we're definitely not a non-profit, btw. While initially the coworking space might not be able to provide seed money, what we do hope to provide from the very beginning is an environment where startups will thrive. Maybe these startups will come from two guys working as a freelance designer and developer within the space, but we want them to meet, collaborate on a random project, pursue an idea and have their idea take off. They'll move out of Conjunctured and right next door into their own offce. "Support" from Conjunctured will start out as vouchers for free rent within the coworking space, but will turn into different kinds of support (money, advisors, etc.) given some time. First the coworking space. The fund comes later.
So, calling it exactly like YC is probably incorrect. Kinda like it? You could say that.
And any Austin people on Hacker News we definitely want to meet, so make sure to follow us on Twitter (I'm @cesart). We're always up for meeting and usually at least one of us is at every tech event in town. The fact that we don't know each other already, given how damn small the city is, is the main reason for trying to rally everyone together in the first place. There HAS to be a central location for everyone to go (startups and VCs alike) in order for good stuff to happen.
Feel free to contact me with any questions or arguments. :)