The 15" Pro has an option for a higher res screen at least; I'm typing this on one with a 1680x1050 screen. I guess you have to pay more for it; one more place where they could potentially simplify the options with a bit less price segmentation.
This contributes to the problem the article illustrates. You outsource your design, as you put it the "logos, color and layout selection, or a new look for something," and then say that the PM and engineers wing the UI and UX?
So you outsource your design and art, and then don't even really have a resource, outsourced or not, for user experience.
Also, it's quite a shame that you're associated designers with being "hip and not passionate" and "specializing and not being an adequate generalist."
Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."
> Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."
I imagined it. And?
There are places where programmers are treated as commodity, and there are places where programmers are prized possessions, and same holds for design, business, sales or any other stream of work. If I feel that all I need is someone to do a $25 logo because basically I don't give a shit about the logo and code is what that matters, it's totally my prerogative. I am under no obligation to appease random people's sense of entitlement.
If you run a design shop or are one of those "idea guys" who need a code monkey to do the easy job of coding so that you can work on the hard parts, would I do it? Fuck no. But that doesn't mean there aren't people who would do it or you are wrong to have such expectations.
I don't know why people feel that the whole world owe them something, and complain about being prosecuted when their perceived debt isn't paid.
We don't "wing" the UI and the UX. We design it. We outsource specific, discrete pieces of other kinds of design that we aren't good at. My point there is that, as the article suggests, we aren't looking for a unicorn designer.
Also, take a deep breath and read what I wrote again. I didn't say that designers in general had those problems, just that the environment at agencies encourages those traits. I stand by that. Programmers who work in particular environments can also have problems adapting to startups, but this article isn't about hiring programmers.
Every building I've seen at Microsoft is big enough, although some are (or are being switched to) open-plan.
Now that I think about it, everywhere I've worked there was enough space so that everybody working there at the time could have had an office.
As to where I'm going to find them: I'm probably going to filter out employers that can't make enough money with programmers to afford an office for each of them. I know this removes a non-trivial number of employers from my potential field of employment options.
The Symantec (formerly Central Point) offices in Beaverton, Oregon, for one. It's been years since I've seen the inside of it, but at least into the early 00s, even low-seniority QA guys had private offices.
Things are relatively cheap when you don't try to locate them right in the middle of an overcrowded city.
I'm a 100% creative type. I used to be a visual designer, and now I focus on UX design with visuals taking a secondary role. As just the type of designer they are describing, Don Draper on Mad Men summed it up:
"[...]we’re the least important, most important thing there is.”
Traditionally, design (and user experience) is the last thing to be added, and the first thing to be cut. If you have 2 founders, a business guy, and a engineer, you can make a product. No design required. But a designer and a business guy? They can make a prototype, but nothing functional.
And we live in a world (the startup, internet world) where function always supersedes form. For every 1 site with good design and bad functionality, there are 50 with bad design and good functionality.
It just so happens that a great many startups are started by technical people. And typically, they can develop a working product, or very advanced prototype, with no designer help at all. And when you add in the "inmates are running the asylum" mentality, most technical founders and engineers don't notice/care if their design (ux, ui, graphic arts) aren't superb because that's just "lipstick and lace."
There are a lot of engineers and technical founders that realize this isn't the case, but they are in the minority.
You pay for people, link farmers, to link back to your webpage with specific anchor text. The link farmers typically have a network of websites they can distribute this over, offering you a few hundred or thousand links back to your site with your targeted keywords. Sometimes, the link farms even have good pagerank, which makes it even better.
That's the whole point of the Google backlinks - get as many links back to your site as you can, and you'll get good SEO.
And if you do this, and Google detects it, they nail you.
This is a quite realistic concern. There is a story going around from Germany were smaller online shops were the targets of link-blackmailing. If they refused to pay certain "fees" they were hit by massive amounts of destructive links, i.e. those with "sex", "viagra" or "porn" keywords. Some shops indeed refused to pay and promptly were loosing massive amounts of traffic/customers.
Here is the original story, unfortunately only in German:
http://www.golem.de/news/google-ranking-wie-ein-erpresser-ei...
It's very unlikely. This seems to be one of the reasons google has been turning what appears to be a blind eye toward paid links - it's hard not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Exactly what I was thinking. Probably not any more than it would cost the website owner, however much that is. Depending on how successful your competition is and how much money you have in the bank this could be a viable strategy.
And the implications of that make me shiver a little.
(Disclosure: I have no idea how much it would cost. But my hypothesis is that it would be the same as if the website owner had done it.)
When people say they "use bootstrap", are people just using it unmodofied?
Throw a "custom.less" at the bottom of your styles.less, and you can make bootstrap completely indistinguishable from the vanilla style.
right now I am building a very large browser app on bootstrap, and you'd never know by looking. All I do is add styles to the "custom.less" and change what needs changing.
Programmers need to realize that customizing the look and feel of bootstrap is VERY VERY easy. It's perfectly safe to use for production.
All bootstrap did was make a vanilla, simple template so you don't have to redo all the boring html work over and over. There is nothing that constrains you to a layout or visual style.
If serious, I would love to show what I mean. I am not a programmer at all, I know nothing but photoshop, HTML, and CSS.
I would be happy to create a demo "web3.0 startup" landing page on bootstrap doing nothing but adding 1 less file and some graphics. And then I could write what I did on my blog or something, or just make a post here.
But saying you can't skin Bootstrap? There is nothing hard about changing all the .less files to be skinned to whatever you want. I am in the middle of doing it for a large project right now, and there won't be any visible evidence of Bootstrap.
Someone who doesn't want to design a skin might not want to take the time, but that doesn't mean it's not easy for someone who is a adept graphic designer and CSS author. Especially with .less.
Anyways, I think we're talking about different things. If you say I can't change Bootstrap to fit my design, that's just plain wrong. Every single line of every .less file can be modified, and it's probably tremendously faster and easier than starting with a reset.less and writing EVERYTHING from the ground up, let alone all the IE hacks and HTML5 workarounds.
I honestly don't see the difficulty in adding/modifying .less files, or changing class names. All the div layouts and HTML can be whatever you want. You don't have to use their grid or responsive layouts.
So saying you can't skin it is ridiculous. The entire .less source is included. Skin it as much as you want. Every single CSS and HTML aspect is customizable. And again, you are no worse off for doing so.
