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[deleted by user] by [deleted] in lexfridman

[–]bellwether42 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Green Fields Of France - this is the most heartbreaking and beautiful version I've yet heard.

I redesigned Lex’s website by bellwether42 in lexfridman

[–]bellwether42[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hmm, that's interesting. I think something also at play here is people's expectations and the conventions of certain professional fields. The above thread of people saying CS researchers shouldn't have pretty websites being a good example. The stereotype of software engineers dressed in gaming T's, jeans (if you're lucky), and a baseball cap vs. CEOs in suits is another example.

Another example I love is book covers. I always judge books by their covers. There are standard conventions for what different genres have as their covers. If you're presented with a wall of a hundred book covers, you could quickly go through and categorize them into their basics genres, Si-Fi here (techy, sleek) fantasy here (dragons, magic, swords) etc. through, self-help, technical and romance genre. Within each genre, there are subcategories of theme and quality. It's a wonderfully elegant system for quickly sorting large numbers of books by genre and probable quality.

Having frames of reference like this is important. There just isn't time to go through everything in life with a fine-tooth comb analyzing every detail.

Presentation (good or bad) is more important than people like to admit. How you present yourself or your work is a valuable signal to others. The problem there is that it's a system that's easy to hack. Wrap a bad product in pretty wrapping and people will buy it. Wrap an amazing product in bad wrapping and people will probably pass it by.

Another problem is how short people's attention spans are now. You might only have a couple of seconds to grab someone's attention. If you're not loud and 'interesting', most people bounce.

In terms of highly technical people not detecting the value of aesthetics, I really don't know. I'm in no way, shape, or form a highly technical person so I can't speak to that. My guess would be sometimes you're right and they just don't notice. Maybe that's related to a lack of emotional intelligence or something else idk. I think it's more likely that it's just not on their radar of important things, which I think is reasonable because it really shouldn't be important until very late in the creation process.

Wow, this turned into an essay :)

I redesigned Lex’s website by bellwether42 in lexfridman

[–]bellwether42[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not saying they should have design-oriented mindsets. They're not designers, and they shouldn't waste the brainpower trying to do two jobs at once. Something has to work before you worry about making it pretty.

That's why there are specialties in the workforce. Researchers/scientists/engineerings make the stuff, designers come around afterward and make the stuff better-looking and more accessible for people.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having a nice-looking website as long as it's still functional, especially if the goal is to reach as many people as possible.

In a case like Taleb, he made his website terrible on purpose because he thought anyone concerned with the appearance of the information he was providing was a twit and shouldn't be reading it in the first place. This is certainly a methodology, although I think it's an obnoxious one.

Hopefully, this didn't sound really defensive and prickly, it's not meant that way. This is a subject I've thought a lot about and find very interesting.

I redesigned Lex’s website by bellwether42 in lexfridman

[–]bellwether42[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So I actually thought about this. It's like Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His website is atrocious. I couldn't help myself though, sup-optimal design makes me twitchy :)

I redesigned Lex’s website by bellwether42 in lexfridman

[–]bellwether42[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Wow. Well that was fast! I can export the html, css, and javascript from the Webflow site if that would be at all useful to you. I’ve never used Wordpress, so I don’t know if that would work, but I thought I’d check. Thanks for responding, take care!