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.
If the criticism has merit, the lack of a Dribbble profile (of all things) should not be used as a shield against critiques. I say that as a huge Dan Cederholm fan.
To CodeAcademy's credit, they're doing a great job welcoming and acknowledging feedback without making any specific promises.
The web is full to bursting with design critiques, but the ones that build a name for their authors always seem to have an air of "how the fuck did you screw this up!?" While these critiques are annoyingly divorced from workplace politics and not necessarily a great way to deal with clients, coworkers, or bosses, us huddled masses love a good controversy. Frankly, that's why I'm reading this thread - I love seeing someone assert their opinion with an argument stronger than "looks gross". And while this author's particular argument may be presented a bit thin, the underlying principles are sound. Every worthwhile engineer I've ever worked with appreciates concise, believable, REAL insight into why some designs work and some designs don't. Worthwhile engineers like learning things.
Keep your confidence up, MichalBures. Keep writing.
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 // cesar@conjunctured.com
